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Thomas Hardy, Sensationalism, and the Melodramatic Mode
10.1057/9780230118843 - Thomas Hardy, Sensationalism, and the Melodramatic Mode, Richard Nemesvari
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Thomas Hardy, Sensationalism, and the Melodramatic Mode Richard Nemesvari
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THOMAS HARDY, SENSATIONALISM , AND THE MELODRAMATIC MODE Copyright © Richard Nemesvari, 2011.
First published in 2011 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the World, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN: 978–0–230–62146–6 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Nemesvari, Richard. Thomas Hardy, sensationalism, and the melodramatic mode / Richard Nemesvari. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 978–0–230–62146–6 1. Hardy, Thomas, 1840–1928—Criticism and interpretation. 2. Sensationalism in literature. 3. Melodrama, English— History and criticism. I. Title. PR4754.N43 2011 823 .8—dc22 2010040164 A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library Design by Integra Software Services First edition: April 2011 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.
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All rights reserved.
To Jane
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“To be together is for us to be at once as free as in solitude, as gay as in company. We talk, I believe, all day long: to talk to each other is but a more animated and an audible thinking.”
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List of Figures
ix
Acknowledgments
xi
Introduction: Thomas Hardy and the Melodramatic Imagination
1
Part I Melodramas of Masculinity—Desperate Remedies and The Mayor of Casterbridge 1 “ ‘I love you better than any man can’ ”: Sensation Fiction, Class, and Gender Role Anxiety in Desperate Remedies
25
2 “ ‘No man ever loved another as I did thee’ ”: Melodrama, Masculinity, and the Moral Occult (I) in The Mayor of Casterbridge
49
Part II Sensational Bodies, Melodramatic Spectacles—Far from the Madding Crowd and A Laodicean 3 “ ‘Kiss me too, Frank . . . You will Frank kiss me too!’ ”: Sensationalism, Surveillance, and Gazing at the Body in Far from the Madding Crowd 4 “ ‘A mixed young lady, rather’ ”: Melodrama, Technology, and Dis/Embodied Sensation in A Laodicean
83 121
Part III Melodramas of Modernity and Class Status—The Hand of Ethelberta and Jude the Obscure 5 “ ‘Lady—not a penny less than lady’ ”: Satire, Melodrama, and the Sensational Fiction of Class Status in The Hand of Ethelberta
153
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Contents
CONTENTS
6 “ ‘Wherefore is light given to him that is in misery?’ ”: Sensationalist Tragedy, Melodramatic Modernity, and the Moral Occult (II) in Jude the Obscure
179
Notes
211
Bibliography
229
Index
239
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viii
1 Hands were loosening his neckerchief
92
2 Her tears fell fast beside the unconscious pair
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List of Figures
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My thanks are due to numerous individuals and institutions that helped in the completion of this book. Lillian Swindall, Librarian of the Dorset County Museum, was (as always) gracious and helpful during my visits there, and Kevin Repp, Curator of the Beinecke Rare Book Library at Yale University, was likewise welcoming and efficient in making its resources available. As well, Christine Faunch, Acting Head of Archives and Special Collections, Library and Research Support, Academic Services, Old Library, and Gemma Poulton, Principal Support Officer (Archives), Special Collections, Old Library, were instrumental in procuring the suitably sensational illustration that fronts this text: cover illustration courtesy of Special Collections, University of Exeter. Thanks also to Angelique Richardson for facilitating my contact with them. The illustrations reproduced in Chapter 3 are courtesy of the Killam Memorial Library, Dalhousie University. For specific analytical guidance I would like to thank Keith Wilson and Jane Thomas, who both commented incisively on an early draft of the book’s Introduction, and Rosemarie Morgan, whose advice proved invaluable in shaping the chapters discussing Desperate Remedies and Jude the Obscure. For financial support during my research I am indebted to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the University Council for Research, St. Francis Xavier University, and the Dean of Arts Research Fund, St. Francis Xavier University. Part of this book’s Introduction originally appeared in the essay “ ‘Judged by a Purely Literary Standard’: Sensation Fiction, Horizons of Expectations, and the Generic Construction of Victorian Realism” in the collection Victorian Sensations: Essays on a Scandalous Genre, eds. Kimberly Harrison and Richard Fantina (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2006), pp. 15–28, and is reprinted here by permission of the publisher. Part of Chapter 1 originally appeared in the essay “ ‘Is it a Man or a Woman?’: Constructing Masculinity in Desperate Remedies” in the collection Human Shows: Essays in Honour of Michael Millgate (New Haven: Hardy Association Press, 2000), pp. 67–88, and is reprinted by permission of the editors. And part of Chapter 6 originally appeared in the essay “Hardy
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Acknowledgments
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
and Victorian Popular Culture: Performing Modernity in Music Hall and Melodrama,” reprinted by permission of Ashgate Publishing Ltd., in The Ashgate Research Companion to Thomas Hardy, ed. Rosemarie Morgan (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2010), pp. 71–86. Finally, more thanks are owed than I can express in so small a space to my wife, Jane Strickler. The best of editors, the best of partners, and the best of companions, this and all my other work would not be possible without her.
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Art is a disproportioning—(i.e., distorting, throwing out of proportion)— of realities, to show more clearly the features that matter in those realities, which, if merely copied or reported inventorially, might possibly be observed, but would more probably be overlooked. Hence “realism” is not Art. —Thomas Hardy, 18901
I
t is a revealing omission that Peter Brooks, in his widely influential study The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess,2 makes not a single, even passing reference to Thomas Hardy. Given Brooks’ critical orientation there are reasonable and possibly predictable explanations for this, but it is still startling to see James, a central figure in the development of modernist psychological realism, receive such prominent treatment in a book on melodrama, while Hardy, an author who throughout his career as a novelist continually employed melodramatic and sensationalist devices, is ignored completely. Yet it is precisely James’ emphasis on the psychology of his characters that makes him so attractive to Brooks, who, as Elaine Hadley notes, “locates melodrama within the psyche of the individual . . . [For Brooks] the rhetoric of melodrama becomes an aestheticized form of psychological expression and its tropes a series of psychic pressure points that move melodrama out of history and, occasionally, into pathology.”3 Although it would be inaccurate to say that Hardy never uses melodrama as a way of exploring the internal states of his protagonists, it is not his primary mode for employing the form. Instead, evoking the melodramatic and the sensational becomes a way for Hardy to engage with the late-Victorian cultural, economic, and sexual anxieties that are central elements of his plots. Charles Lock, explicitly analyzing the difference between the two authors,
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Introduction: Thomas Hardy and the Melodramatic Imagination
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suggests that “Hardy’s strategy of avoidance, his determination, at any rate, to do things differently from James, was . . . achieved . . . by . . . an obsession with seeing, with describing, with remaining on the outside,”4 and this specular emphasis on the external connects Hardy to the public and political theatrics of stage melodrama in a way that is antithetical to James’ emphasis on the theater of the mind. For this reason more contemporary materialist and historicist analyses of melodrama, which often explicitly define themselves against the perceived “ahistorical” perspective of Brooks, provide important insights into the ways Hardy’s resistance to the realist project embodied itself in his fiction through unsublimated melodramatic elements. That Victorian melodrama, and the kinds of sensation fiction that grew out of and fed back into nineteenth-century dramaturgy, is central to Hardy’s novelistic method needs to be acknowledged more explicitly than most studies of his work have been willing to concede. This is not to suggest, however, that Brooks has nothing to contribute to the understanding of Hardy and melodrama. Brooks’ construction of melodrama as a form preeminently concerned with “excess and overstatement”5 and his discussion of the relationship between it and tragedy are especially useful. As well, it is an oversimplification to accuse Brooks of a purely ahistorical approach. Although it is true that his Freudian reading runs the risk of universalizing and thus potentially reifying melodrama into a category detached from the social structures that defined it, Brooks is quite specific about the cultural focus of his study. My point of reference in melodrama proper is almost exclusively “classic” French melodrama as it came to be established at the dawn of the nineteenth century—in the aftermath of the Revolution—and as it endured, with modifications and complications, into the 1860s . . . This point of reference is not entirely arbitrary, since it includes the original state of melodrama— Pixerécourt is regarded as the founder of the genre—and the period of its greatest flourishing, when it dominated the stages of Paris and included in its audiences the greatest mixture of social classes. Here in particular must lie my justification for neglecting British and American melodrama in favor of French. Not only were the word and the genre of French invention (and a clear instance of exportation from France to England and then America), the classic examples of French melodrama were written for a public that extended from the lower classes . . . through all sectors of the middle class, and even embraced members of the aristocracy . . . Whereas in England, melodrama seems quickly to have become exclusively entertainment for the lower orders, indeed, in the Surreyside houses, for the mob. Good society stayed away from the theatre, until later in the century, when smaller, more elite houses began providing “drawing-room” melodrama.6
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INTRODUCTION
3
Much of the subject matter of early English melodrama was originally French, and the influence of French melodrama was immense, but it must be stressed that English melodrama was by no means a French product, nor did the French antedate the English. While it is true that the full flowering of melodrama in Paris occurred a few years earlier than in London, with the inevitable imitation of the former by the latter, this is largely because there was no French equivalent of the Licensing Act operative in the early years of the Revolution to prevent a rapid multiplication of theatres presenting whatever they liked. In fact French melodrama was at first derived from the English Gothic novel and gothic drama, either directly or through French novelists like Ducray-Duminil.8
Further, Booth would dispute Brooks’ claims about the class distinctions surrounding melodrama. He argues that in London melodrama was produced by the patent theatres, where it could be seen with great scenic effect as early as the 1790’s . . . Some of the bestknown early melodramas . . . were done at Drury Lane, Covent Garden, and the Haymarket, and the patent theatres continued to play new melodramas and steal successful ones from the minor theatres . . . Throughout the century the West End of London had several strongholds of melodrama . . . [including] Drury Lane itself.9
This breakdown of the East End/West End dichotomy suggests that melodrama’s ability to “extend” from the lower to the upper classes was as English as it was French, and was in place early in the form’s development. Brooks’ determined exclusion of English melodrama, and his denial of its evolution as described by Booth, is thus another reason for his exclusion of Hardy. The novelist’s Dorset upbringing connected him to an oral tradition whose focus on tales of extreme situations and extreme responses was quintessentially melodramatic long before the word had been coined to describe a Parisian dramatic form. His subsequent childhood reading, and later adult move to London during the height of stage melodrama’s popularity and at the very moment in which the debate over sensation drama and sensation fiction was reaching its peak, meant that his experience of these genres was thoroughly English. To the extent, therefore, that, as Hadley suggests, “the melodramatic mode emerged in the
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These assertions do, however, bring Brooks into conflict with a differing perspective on the backgrounds of melodrama. Michael Booth, in English Melodrama, comes very close to simply contradicting Brooks’ assertions. Because Booth traces melodrama’s roots to Elizabethan and Jacobean tragedy, his origin claims are very different.7
THOMAS HARDY, SENSATIONALISM, MELODRAMATIC MODE
early and mid-nineteenth century as a polemical response to the social, economic, and epistemological changes that characterized the consolidation of market society . . . especially the varied effects of the classificatory procedures instituted by English bureaucracies,”10 that mode is available to Hardy as a rhetoric of cultural critique rather than as one of exploratory psychodrama, because “in its always public and theatrical response to the classification of English society, [it] also resisted . . . [the] interiorization of the subject.”11 For him the purpose of the melodramatic imagination is to generate a “disproportioning” of perception in order to force a recognition of ideologies that might otherwise remain invisible to the encultured subject, and it is precisely melodrama’s refusal to accept the “realities” of status quo discourse that make it such a potent tool for challenging Victorian conventionalities. To fully understand Hardy’s employment of melodrama, however, it is necessary first to look in some detail at the background out of which grew his awareness of the form. As Michael Millgate has observed, Hardy’s novels “are heavily dependent for their settings, their details, and often their plots upon things heard and seen in his childhood: told and retold stories of smuggling and invasion alarms, local scandals and public punishments . . . [and he] drew above all on the vivid taletelling of his parents.”12 Donald Davidson’s 1940 essay “The Traditional Basis of Thomas Hardy’s Fiction” provides the first concerted argument emphasizing the orality of Hardy’s narratives, and with its claim that “the characteristic Hardy novel is conceived as a told . . . story, or at least not as a literary story; that it is an extension, in the form of a modern prose fiction, of a traditional ballad or an oral tale” 13 it raises important issues about Hardy’s employment of melodramatic conventions. The recurrence of sensational incident, the emphasis on plot development over character development, and the presentation of extreme emotional and physical conflict are all strategies the storyteller uses to hold the attention of her or his listener, just as they are the strategies the melodramatist uses to hold her or his audience, and they are also characteristic elements of Hardy’s novels. His persistent representation of himself as a teller of tales and stories throughout his self-written The Life and Work of Thomas Hardy14 indicates a clear intent to distinguish his narrative mode from that of post-Romantic realism and naturalism, as does the following often-quoted observation from that work: A story must be exceptional enough to justify its telling. We tale-tellers are all Ancient Mariners, and none of us is warranted in stopping Wedding Guests (in other words, the hurrying public) unless he has something more unusual to relate than the ordinary experience of every average man and woman.
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INTRODUCTION
5
While Hardy’s allusion to Coleridge’s supernaturally mesmeric narrator has attracted considerable critical comment, less attention has been paid to the second part of the passage. The explicit linking of fiction with drama emphasizes the need for theatricality in both, and this, along with the emphasis on exceptional circumstances shaping the “constructional part” of narrative, helps explain Hardy’s consistent punctuating of his novels with such structural staples of melodrama as tableaux and sensation scenes. Further, the passage’s evocation of “things eternal and universal,” obviously appropriate following a reference to The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, connects directly to Brooks’ concept of the “moral occult,” which he defines as “the domain of operative spiritual values which is both indicated within and masked by the surface of reality. The moral occult is not a metaphysical system; it is rather the repository of the fragmentary and desacralized remnants of sacred myth . . . The melodramatic mode in large measure exists to locate and to articulate the moral occult.”16 For Brooks melodrama is not a debased and trivial imitation of tragedy; instead, it comes into being in a world where the traditional imperatives of truth and ethics have been violently thrown into question, yet where the promulgation of truth and ethics, their instauration as a way of life, is of immediate, daily, political concern . . . [M]elodrama becomes the principal mode for uncovering, demonstrating, and making operative the essential moral universe in a post-sacred era.17
The applicability of these ideas to Hardy is clear.18 Having experienced his own gradual but eventually complete erosion of religious belief, and living in an age when the loss of that belief was often constituted as a crisis in both individual and cultural terms, Hardy’s fiction attempts to portray, and constitute, an ethical engagement between the individual and society in a world without deity or divinity. The result is an extreme clash of ambivalent desires and conflicting principles that, because it occurs in a realm of radical uncertainty, produces the kind of (often destructive) “excess” that indicates unresolved ideological cruxes. What is sometimes designated Hardy’s tragic vision, therefore, is not undercut or neutralized by his employment of melodrama: the two are an embodiment of the same aesthetic urge. In attempting to represent the conflicts of his age he utilized melodramatic tropes not because of artistic inability or
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The whole secret of fiction and the drama—in the constructional part— lies in the adjustment of things unusual to things eternal and universal. The writer who knows exactly how exceptional, and non-exceptional, his events should be made, possesses the key to the art.15
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imaginative failure, and not even simply because they were part of a dominant and popular contemporary form, but rather because they provided a way of exploring a late-Victorian culture in which, as Tom Gunning puts it, “the moral occult becomes a tangle of contradictory discourses and the sense of personal identity and integrity . . . becomes dissolved by a growing sense of the precariousness of reason and the materiality of consciousness.”19 Hardy, then, is experimenting with ways to engage Victorian culture and the nascent modernity it is generating without committing to the Jamesian realist mode, and this in turn allows him to create hybrid texts that reveal scant interest in generating the intense formalist unity prized by “the Master.” Hardy’s willingness to mix apparently disparate genres within his fiction comes close to being his most distinctive novelistic device, and Anastasia Nikolopoulou’s comments demonstrate how this would also draw him to melodrama. Often produced from materials the melodramatist collected from the great tragedies, from novels, narrative poems, sentimental dramas, legends, and oral tradition, the melodrama represented history as a process of small, localized episodes, rather than as a grand, unifying process. Instead of trying to represent a secure totality, the melodramatist worked by collecting materials from different sources which were put together with the eagerness of a craftsman-artisan rather than with the mastery of the “poet-artist” hailed by the literati.20
This manner of representing historical/social change neatly describes any number of Hardy novels from the early (Under the Greenwood Tree) to the late (Jude the Obscure). Further, Nikolopoulou’s connection of the melodramatist to the “craftsman-artisan” is a continuation of the theoretical basis of her essay: Walter Benjamin’s exploration of the differing modes of oral and print narrative in “The Storyteller: Reflections on the Works of Nikolai Leskov.” For her, Benjamin helps us to understand that “[t]he relationship between melodrama and storytelling goes beyond sharing generic and formal affinities . . . The significance of melodrama’s kinship to storytelling needs to be sought in their emotional economy. In reviving the performativity of . . . narrative, the melodrama also redirects the emotional responses produced in the reader.”21 Melodrama’s appeal to shared communal experience, both in the formulae of its plots and in its enactment before a group, mimics the telling of tales in a way that is profoundly antithetical to the atomized activity of producing and consuming novels. Oral presentation is a kind of theater that creates a bond unavailable to an author writing (silently) to an audience who will (silently) read his or
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7
[t]he novelist has isolated himself. The birthplace of the novel is the solitary individual, who is no longer able to express himself by giving examples of his most important concerns, is himself uncounseled, and cannot counsel others . . . In the midst of life’s fullness, and through the representation of this fullness, the novel gives evidence of the profound perplexity of the living.22
For Benjamin the novel thus becomes a symptom of what Hardy identified as the “ache of modernism,”23 and its effect is, ironically, to reinforce the malaise it reveals but is powerless to assuage. Lock also invokes Benjamin, and refers to “The Storyteller” extensively to show the ways in which its ideas match Davidson’s analysis of Hardy. I agree with Lock’s observation that “neither of these essays is motivated by nostalgia as such,”24 but I would put a rather different emphasis on what Benjamin is suggesting. Although there can be no doubt that he is exploring the aesthetic and ideological implications in the shift from storytelling to novel writing, he is also using Leskov to locate the cultural moment in which this transition occurred, and it is telling that Leskov’s dates (1831–1895) not only locate his prose fiction in almost exactly the same period as Hardy’s, but also that the year of his death is the very year in which Hardy published his final novel. Benjamin sees Leskov as one of the last authors capable of retaining the “incomparable aura”25 of the storyteller even though he works through print, and although the other English-speaking authors he invokes specifically are Poe and Stevenson, I would argue that Hardy, through his use of melodrama, can be placed in the same category. It was “the evolving middle class” and “fully developed capitalism”26 that, Benjamin argues, provided the opportunity for the novel to impose its dominance, but Hadley notes that “[a]s a vehicle of protest . . . the melodramatic mode could empower its practitioners with rhetorical and behavioural strategies responsive to invasions of market culture,”27 even as it was also often co-opted by being a part of that same culture. Nevertheless, in the early and middle decades of the Victorian period, melodrama could expose, through extravagantly enacting them, the tensions inherent in Britain’s increasingly swift movement away from what might be called laboring-class orality toward the bourgeois, commoditized detachment represented by mass-produced, printed fiction. That aspects of this evolution are central to Hardy’s plots and themes explains how melodramatic form and ideological content often manage effectively to support each other in his novels. As a storyteller Hardy is not concerned to achieve the kind of “pure” realism that for James
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her work, and most likely never see the person who produced the text. As Benjamin puts it,
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is the only type of legitimate novelistic expression, but his method has its own artistic integrity. Benjamin asserts that “[i]f peasants and seamen were past masters of storytelling, the artisan class was its university,”28 and Hardy’s family roots, which connected him directly to both peasants and the artisan class, place him firmly in the tradition Benjamin describes. Having said this, however, it is important to keep in mind Mary Rimmer’s warning that it would be a serious mistake to construct Hardy “as an extra-cultural phenomenon . . . outside of print culture and history,”29 since as already suggested his work often records the passing of the oral culture described by Benjamin. The most obvious example of Hardy’s blending of the oral and the printed occurs in what has come to be called his “Facts” notebook, the concerted effort by him and Emma Hardy, his first wife, to record from various sources the world of pre-Victorian Dorset. This is especially true of the material taken from issues of the Dorset County Chronicle covering the years 1826–1830, the largest single source for the notebook. William Greenslade argues that when in March 1884 he came to the reading of the old Dorset County Chronicle, the record which emerged in “Facts” was less an innocent text than one which authenticated and enlarged on, from public sources, what he had long ago heard from the private testimony of his family. The talk of family and neighbourhood (which included not only Bockhampton but Puddletown) was confirmed and capped repeatedly by the old papers’ reports.30
That Hardy would use a written source to both corroborate and quantify the verbal tales of his childhood demonstrates that he inhabits both worlds, as does his youthful reading, which according to the Life included “Dumas pere’s romances . . . in an English translation, and Shakespeare’s tragedies for the plots only.”31 Perhaps equally significant was Hardy’s early enjoyment of Harrison Ainsworth, whom Millgate describes as “one of his favourite authors at that period,”32 since his novels too were plotdriven narratives, but of a very particular sort. Although his later works such as Old St Paul’s (1841) and Windsor Castle (1843), which we know Hardy read, were examples of historical romance, Ainsworth was also a central figure in the controversy surrounding the rise of the Newgate novel, and it seems unlikely that Hardy would not also have taken in his two most famous examples of that genre: Rookwood (1834) and Jack Sheppard (1839).33 These novels combined melodramatic incident with representations of crime and violence in ways that clearly mimicked the extremities of contemporary stage narratives, which was partly why they became so notorious. Indeed, Jack Sheppard was turned almost immediately into a highly popular melodrama—one that was seen as so potentially
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dangerous to impressionable audiences that “although already-licensed stage adaptations . . . were allowed to continue, permission for any further productions was refused,”34 because they were thought to encourage antisocial behavior. This connection to the disreputable helps explain Carl J. Weber’s rather dubious attitude in his early article directly linking the two authors, which concludes with the observation that “if no one now reads Ainsworth for his own sake, he at least deserves a quiet shelf in a Thomas Hardy library; for as one surveys the Wessex Novels it is clear that the shadow of William Harrison Ainsworth falls across many of their pages.”35 In this instance Hardy’s childhood and adolescent reading strongly reinforces his experience of narrative in the oral tradition of his family, for the stories passed on in that tradition as reported by the Chronicle demonstrate how “crime, extraordinary and petty, is insistently present—murder, highway robbery, theft and fraud of all kinds, horse-stealing, bodysnatching, and particularly in issues of 1830, machine-breaking and incendiarism.”36 This last item is especially revealing, since as Greenslade observes these entries leave “a powerful impression of a region in the grip of sustained economic depression and social privation . . . The general distress, and the crime it gives rise to, comes through in Hardy’s terse summaries: ‘Great distress and poverty in the country at this period . . . Suicides: horse-stealing; highway robbery frequent.’ ”37 For Hardy, then, illegality and criminality may serve as indicators of individuals and cultures in transitional crisis, so that the results of reprobated behavior function to illustrate more than simple bad actions deserving of punishment. This in turn helps explain the litany of crime and near-crime that pervades Hardy’s fiction. Murder, attempted murder, theft, fraud, bigamy, adultery, suicide, attempted suicide, and a very famous wife sale, all appear in Hardy’s fiction to an extent that can be rather startling when tallied up. In some cases the perpetrators are the villains of the text, but they are sometimes also the protagonists, so that the reader is led to sympathize with characters whose morals and conduct appear, on one level, to be more than a little problematic. Like Ainsworth’s subversive hero-criminals, however, Hardy’s compromised men and women act as comments on the social forces that shape and at times appear to dictate their choices, so that the melodrama that results is constructed as both an “aesthetic of protest” and a “culture of resistance.”38 It is this that so often disturbed Hardy’s negative reviewers, who worried about the improper identifications his novels encouraged, and it is also this that generates one of the connections between Hardy and the form that supplanted Newgate fiction while at the same time providing a direct bridge between theatrical melodrama and the printed page—the sensation novel.
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THOMAS HARDY, SENSATIONALISM, MELODRAMATIC MODE
Initiated by the explosive popularity of Wilkie Collins’ The Woman in White (1860), sensation texts were a market phenomenon, outselling by wide margins works by Eliot, Meredith, and Trollope. The critical furor generated by the conflict between sensation fiction and its putative opposite, the realist novel, dominated the 1860s and continued to provide a touchstone for reviewer comment into the 1870s. As Rachel Ablow observes, however, it is necessary to recognize that although Collins initiated the form “the negative critical backlash against [sensation novels] . . . only began to appear in 1863 and 1864, several years after the publication of The Woman in White,”39 for this particular text received almost uniformly positive reviews. It was the equally startling success of East Lynne (1861) by Ellen Wood, along with Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret (1862) shortly followed by Aurora Floyd (1863), that provoked the increasingly fervid (verging at times on frenzied) negative reaction to sensationalism, and it was at just this time that the 21-year-old Thomas Hardy took up residence in London to advance his apprenticeship as an aspiring architect. Although there are no specific references to the sensation fiction debate in the Life or in Hardy’s letters, it is highly unlikely that he and the circle of young men who formed his acquaintance at the architectural offices of Arthur Blomfield and Benjamin Ferry, all of whom prided themselves on being familiar with the social scandals and cultural controversies of their day, would have been unaware of a prominent battle over the proper writing of fiction waged in Blackwood’s Magazine, the Westminster Review, and the Athenaeum. Certainly a later entry in Hardy’s literary notebooks, transcribing a passage from Trollope’s Autobiography, suggests that he had given the issue some thought. The division of novels into sensational & anti-sens[ational] a Mistake—wh[ich] arises from the inability of the imperfect artist to be at the same time realistic & sens[ational]. A good novel sh[ould] be both, & both in the highest degree. Horrors heaped on horrors are not tragic, but dull. But he who can deal adequately with tragic elements is a greater artist than the writer whose efforts never carry him above the mild walks of everyday life. No novel is anything, for comedy or tragedy, unless the reader can sympathize with the characters. If the author can thus touch his reader’s heart, & draw his tears, he cannot be too sens[ational].40
Detailed studies of Victorian responses to sensation fiction are now widely available,41 so only those elements most relevant to Hardy need be discussed here. What is most interesting about this notebook entry is the way
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in which it clearly acknowledges both of the most contentious elements of sensationalism. The accusation that sensation fiction concentrated on criminal, unnatural, and perverse behavior was central to the position that such novels were contrary to commonsense experience, and therefore could be dismissed as unbelievable because they were unrealistic. But this passage’s insistence that the “greater artist” must aim beyond “the mild walks of everyday life,” a clear precursor to his already-quoted idea in the Life that the novelist must not be restricted to “ordinary experience,” demonstrates his belief that reality is broader than the strictures of realism might wish to recognize. This being the case, it is unsurprising that his novels are filled with events that match what might be called the abstract definition of “sensational”—that is, extravagant actions and responses that startle because of their unexpectedness or excess. Obviously this is a large part of what ties sensation fiction back to melodrama, for the two forms rely on exaggerated plot twists and sudden revelations, but as important is the second element revealed in Hardy’s entry, which is the appeal to intense emotion. This literal meaning of sensationalism—an appeal to the senses, and to the sensual—was presented by its detractors as an especially unappealing aspect of the form, particularly when that sensuality was explicitly connected to women. It is partly for this reason that attacks on the sensation novel began with the appearance of Wood’s and Braddon’s novels, which present the transgressive but suggestively sympathetic female characters Isabel Vane, Lucy Audley, and Aurora Floyd. With the appearance of Collins’ No Name (1862), and its introduction of the conniving and passionate Magdalene Vanstone, a major pattern of sensation novels was set in a way that many Victorian reviewers found disturbing. A cultural ideology that attempted to construct most women, or at least most “proper” women, as asexual domestic angels was profoundly shaken by the suggestion that female passion and sensuality were pervasively present, and this discomfort found continued expression in later uneasy responses to Bathsheba Everdene, Paula Power, Eustacia Vye, Tess Durbeyfield, and Sue Bridehead. As Ann Cvetkovich has noted: [t]he sensation novel’s sensational representations are very often literally bodies, particularly women’s bodies, whose erotic appeal is part of their sensational appeal. The apparent naturalness of sensational responses is closely tied to the apparently natural capacity of women’s bodies to produce sensations. It also is closely tied to the apparently natural capacity of women’s bodies to experience sensation.42
Hardy’s choice to consistently place women at the center of his narratives, and to focus on issues of female sexuality and eroticism, means that his
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THOMAS HARDY, SENSATIONALISM, MELODRAMATIC MODE
novels evoke a key aspect of sensationalism whatever else they may be doing or attempting. Like its theatrical source, in which it is “the heroine who is the emotional core of melodrama and very often the storm centre of its action,”43 sensation fiction understands the expressive power available to narratives that employ a female protagonist, and so does Hardy. But sensation novels, arising as they did at a cultural moment when the conventional assignment of women’s roles was increasingly called into question, politicized the exploration of gender in ways earlier drama did not. Lyn Pykett is thus right to insist that women sensationalists put the emotional and linguistic excess of melodrama to new uses . . . representation of the family in the women’s sensation novel was more conflicted and ambiguous than in the popular stage melodrama . . . Indeed one of the most interesting aspects of the sensation novel (and, no doubt, a primary source of narrative interest for contemporary readers) is the way in which it problematises the family, explores women’s contradictory roles within it and articulates their complex and contradictory feelings about it.44
Hardy may not focus specifically on the woman’s role in the family, but he does take sensation fiction’s widened scope and use it to explore the conflicts and ambiguities that confront women attempting to negotiate autonomy in an aggressively patriarchal society. His obvious (if occasionally compromised) sympathy with that struggle often lies at the center of his creative impulse, and his perception that the resulting forced accommodations are deeply ambivalent, and at times deadly, can move his combination of melodrama and sensationalism into a tragic mode that expands the form even further. This, in turn, raises the vexed question of generic definition. Because both melodrama and sensation fiction are hybrid forms that place little value on formalist unities and consistencies, it is difficult to itemize those elements that nominally determine their structures. For this reason recent critics tend to use the term “melodramatic mode” for analytical purposes, even while continuing to acknowledge the cultural artifact known as melodrama. The sensation novel might appear to be more easily quantified, but it is just as fluid as its dramatic precursor, as is clearly shown by the three texts that inspired the term. The first-person, multi-narrative mosaic of detection in The Woman in White has little in common with the third-person, linear domestic melodrama of East Lynne, while Lady Audley’s Secret combines the two and creates its own uniquely mixed effect. The situation is further complicated with the addition of Charles Reade, whose novel Hard Cash (1863) was seen as furthering the sensationalist
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movement through its often lurid presentation of abuses in private lunatic asylums. Reade’s aggressive defense of his fiction against charges that his stories were exaggerated and unbelievable took the form of gleefully providing the newspaper and government reports used as research for his plots, and while this emphasis on documentation and didacticism connects him to Hardy, it separates him from the early sensationalism of Collins, Wood, and Braddon. Sensation novels provide strong support for Bakhtin’s assertion that “individual examples of the novel are historically active, not a generic canon as such,”45 and Cvetkovich makes a convincing case when she argues that “the term ‘sensation novel’ refers more to the genre’s status as mass culture than to its particular narrative style or content.”46 The populist elements of the melodramatic mode are therefore transferred to print in a way that precisely fits Hardy’s efforts to avoid the constraints of formal novelistic realism, and that also actively encourages his eclectic style. Sensation fiction’s multivalent generic possibilities, however, often find expression around one particular trope, and to the extent that there is any consistency to the form it resides in its focus on the secrecy required by the reprobated behaviors it depicts. In an early formative statement Kathleen Tillotson asserts that “the purest type of sensation novel is the novelwith-a-secret,”47 although the expression of that secret can be developed in different ways. A novel centered on the gradual exposure of a mystery keeps the reader in suspense along with the characters, while in a different kind of text the secret may be known to the reader but remain mysterious to its characters for much of the narrative. In either case, however, the key message is that things are not as they seem, and this refusal to accept that appearance matches reality was seen as another dangerous element of sensationalism because it became the device by which accepted values could be questioned. The idea that just beneath the surface of bourgeois Victorian respectability roiled a disconcerting current of crime and illicit desire suggested a dissatisfaction with the status quo that many critics felt must be attacked and denied. The sensationalism debate therefore often took the form of arguing about who was “looking” in the proper places and “seeing” society correctly, the sensationalists or their detractors, and this emphasis on the specular, the viewable, and the shifting subjectivities of perspective provides another connection to Hardy. His novels often contain secrets that are central to the themes of gender and class he explores, and that are exposed through systems of observation, voyeurism, surveillance, and outright spying that, as J. Hillis Miller argues in Thomas Hardy: Distance and Desire, are characteristic of both Hardy’s plots and his narrative method. For him there is only “a temporary and fleeting way of looking at things. Any point of view is only one moment of
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THOMAS HARDY, SENSATIONALISM, MELODRAMATIC MODE
vision among many,”48 and the result is a structural questioning of certainties that assists his more overt, didactic interrogation of Victorian cultural platitudes. Hardy’s employment of the gaze has other implications as well. Since “[s]pying and being spied upon are among the dominant activities in sensation fiction,”49 the form lends itself very specifically to Foucault’s ideas about the shift from a culture of punishment to one of discipline. This evolution, connected to the rising dominance of laissez-faire capitalism and the consumerist society, requires the apparent paradox of controlled excess, providing further opportunities for the sensation novel’s transcribed melodrama to explore the effects of the new discourse. Hardy, by utilizing this same trope extensively in both rural and urban settings, demonstrates the growing pervasive effect of panoptical surveillance. This does not undercut sensationalism’s emphasis on the transgressively sensual, since as Foucault notes “it is always the body that is at issue—the body and its forces, their utility and their docility, their distribution and their submission.”50 The power of the covert gaze, to gather information, penetrate secrets, influence, compel, and thus shape an individual’s responses, appears throughout Hardy’s novels, and illustrates that, as Foucault observes, [t]he human body was entering a machinery of power that explores it, breaks it down, and rearranges it. A “political anatomy,” which was also a “mechanics of power,” was being born; it defined how one may have a hold over others’ bodies, not only so that they may do what one wishes, but so that they may operate as one wishes, with the techniques, the speed and the efficiency that one determines. Thus discipline produces subjected and practiced bodies, “docile” bodies. Discipline increases the forces of the body (in economic terms of utility) and diminishes those same forces (in political terms of obedience). In short, it dissociates power from the body . . . If economic exploitation separates the force and the product of labour, let us say that disciplinary coercion establishes in the body the constricting link between an increased aptitude and an increased domination.51
Since disciplinary power “is exercised through its invisibility,”52 the fact that Hardy explicitly acknowledges this process while exploring its problematic impact suggests that even at this early point in its ideological formulation it was visible enough to impinge on the conscious awareness, and therefore that the full internalization of “docile” self-monitoring was not yet complete. Living during the period in which the transferal of socially performed coercion (in 1858 Hardy witnessed one of the last public hangings in Dorset) to the private, “normalizing judgement”53 of the inner psychological monitor was still in process, Hardy uses sensationalist devices
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focused on the body to represent the complex material ramifications of this growing cultural authority. But Hardy’s novels also, through their insistent employment of public display and communal expression of values—in other words, through their use of the melodramatic mode—suggest a resistance to the new power structure that acts as an important qualifier to Foucault’s ideas as they apply to nineteenth-century England. Lauren Goodlad has argued extensively that “we have yet fully to document the differences between the disciplinary subject of Foucault’s Franco-oriented and presentist genealogy, and the modes of character idealized by and produced in Britain’s selfconsciously liberal society,”54 and that “Foucault’s genealogical method, with its special reliance on panoptical institutions, presents numerous problems for the scholar of Victorian Britain.”55 Obviously Hardy’s texts cannot in themselves resolve these analytical difficulties, but they do help to illustrate the issue in their combination of discourses that Foucault saw as antithetical. Hardy’s fiction describes a British society in which melodramatic spectacle coexists with sensationalist panopticism, and it is the clashing concepts of individualism that they entail that often drive his characters’ conflicts with each other and with their culture’s expectations. That spectacle was still an important element of his midVictorian world, aesthetically and ideologically, would not have been difficult for Hardy to discern, since his encounters with nineteenthcentury stagecraft and its wider implications made this emphatically clear. If there is no direct evidence that Hardy followed the sensation fiction controversy during his five years in London, there is no doubt at all that he took advantage of his stay there to attend the opera and plays. Millgate observes that “W. O. Milne, who arrived at Blomfield’s as an assistant in 1866, later remembered Hardy’s fondness for music and the theatre and said that the two of them ‘used occasionally to indulge in a pit, at Drury Lane especially when a Shakespeare play was on,’ ”56 while in the Life Hardy records that “Charles Kean and his wife were still performing Shakespeare at the Princess’s Theatre,” and that he and a friend attended “the romantic Italian operas of Covent Garden and Her Majesty’s—the latter being then also an opera house—which places they used to frequent two or three times a week; not, except on rare occasions, in the best parts of the houses, as will be well imagined, but in the half-crown amphitheatre.” 57 Although this choice of theatrical material was no doubt part of Hardy’s efforts to increase his cultural capital, an important activity for a young man of equivocal class status and education encountering the metropolis for the first time, the distinction between “high” and “low” drama had experienced a shift that was reaching its culmination during this period. Despite
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The period from 1815 to the 1860s was financially difficult for theatres, with many closures and bankruptcies, and with desperate attempts to find new revenue by a general lowering of seat prices. The lower prices, notably at Drury Lane and at Covent Garden (which went to opera in 1847), were designed not only to keep present audiences but also to attract new ones at a lower level of class and income. This undoubtedly had effects upon the repertory, moving several theatres firmly in the direction of gratifying popular taste in melodrama, farce and spectacle entertainment . . . As late as the 1880s and 1890s . . . certain West End theatres, like the Adelphi, the Princess’s and Drury Lane had a strong element of lower middle-class and workingclass patronage, confined to the pit and gallery perhaps but still an influence on the choice of repertory.58
Along with expanding what was appearing on stage, this broadening of audience (of which Hardy as an apprentice architect is a good example) meant that the way in which plays were presented also altered. It is significant that Hardy specifically mentions Charles Kean’s productions of Shakespeare, since Kean was a central figure in applying the kind of spectacle common in melodrama and sensation drama to Shakespeare’s texts. Unsurprisingly Kean’s productions were often criticized, because “[s]pectacle’s conquest of melodrama and pantomime merely signified the loss of outposts remote from the heartland of the legitimate drama, but to strike at Shakespeare himself endangered the very capital of the country.”59 Theater managers who introduced spectacle into their versions of Shakespeare defended in two ways their choice to do so against charges of merely pandering to their audience. First, they argued that by reproducing the settings and action of the plays through startlingly elaborate sets, hyperrealistic backdrops, and massed extras they were in fact educating their audience in the historical and cultural backgrounds necessary to fully understand Shakespeare’s intentions. This “archaeological” response allowed spectacle to be constructed as didactic realism, and could thus directly rebut accusations that spectacular scenes were mere disruptions that subordinated the drama to theatrical effects. The second argument, connected to the first, was that contemporary Victorian audiences, unused to Elizabethan conventions of poetic description to invoke the mise-en-scène, required elaborate visual representations in order to become fully engaged with the drama. Spectacle, its defenders argued in both cases, becomes a tool for entering the dramatic world, rather than a distraction from it, and the sensation scenes made increasingly possible
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the efforts of the licensing system to ensure that the patent theaters stayed focused on their monopoly to produce serious drama, economic realities forced managers to broaden their offerings.
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by the elaborate theatrical machinery of the period played a large part in achieving the intended audience engagement. As a young man attending midperiod Victorian theater in London, Hardy was exposed to narrative techniques that assumed that exaggeration and excess were acceptable modes for even the most serious of texts. Romantic opera of the kind seen by him was almost by definition composed largely of spectacle and melodrama, and as for Shakespeare, he was often invoked in the sensationalism debates. George Augustus Sala, writing “On the ‘Sensational’ in Literature and Art” for the February 1868 issue of Belgravia, is vehement in presenting his position. What is Sensationalism, and who is Sensational? I will strive to tell you. The late Mr. William Shakespeare was an arrant sensational writer. He wrote the play of “Macbeth,” which is founded mainly on murder and witchcraft. He wrote “Hamlet,” in which there are many murders, a suicide, a suspicion of madness, and a ghost. He wrote “Othello,” in which there is jealousy, and also murder. He wrote “King Lear,” in which you will find murder, blindness, and madness . . . The late M. de Voltaire highly objected to Shakespeare’s sensationalism. He called him un babare grotesque. He preferred murder à la Grecque, when you can only hear the slaughtered Agamemnon groaning behind the scenes. He liked Peloponnesian adultery, Heracleidan seduction, and Attic incest . . . In the opinion of dolts and dullards and envious backbiters, everything is “sensational” that is vivid, and nervous, and forcible, and true.60
Given arguments such as this it is hardly surprising that two of the most famous theatrical sensation scenes during this period, on a par with Eliza escaping with her baby across the ice in dramatizations of Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the railway-track rescue in Boucicault’s After Dark, were the storm-and-madness scene in King Lear, and that in which Birnam Wood comes to Dunsinane, leading to the climactic battle between the forces of Macduff and Macbeth and their final duel. Although each of these scenes relied for its impact on what we would now call special effects, it is telling that each also, as does almost every theatrical sensation scene of the time, represents the human body as exposed, threatened, and in some cases killed. Foucauldian spectacle is thus artistically/dramatically available to British audiences even as the actuality of public torture and execution fades rapidly into the past. Hardy’s aesthetic experience while in London, then, presented no conflict between the melodramatic imagination, sensationalism, the spectacular, realism, and tragedy. Instead, it suggested the necessity of encompassing all aspects of these only apparently contradictory modes in order to successfully involve an audience, and thus make it receptive to the author’s purposes. Throughout his literary career
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THOMAS HARDY, SENSATIONALISM, MELODRAMATIC MODE
Hardy was “simultaneously beguiled by the excitement of the theatre and repelled by its artifice . . . even as he adapted to his own specific purposes some of the techniques and conventions of both the serious and popular stage,”61 but his later ambivalence about acknowledging this influence on his fiction was based on more than just the “artificiality” of Victorian drama. By the time Hardy had finished with writing novels at the end of the nineteenth century and (re)turned to poetry there was no doubt which form had won the contest between realist fiction and the sensation novel. I have argued elsewhere that the sensation fiction debate was crucial in generically defining British psychological realism,62 and in establishing it as the only type of fiction that needed to be taken seriously; this being the case, it became absolutely essential for Hardy’s reputation that he repudiate those elements of the melodramatic imagination that undercut his claim to realist authority. His efforts to do so, and their effectiveness, would influence Hardy criticism for a large part of the twentieth century. After the publication of Jude the Obscure (1895) Hardy’s status as a popular, if controversial, author made the possibility of collecting his works and printing them under a unified format attractive from both a literary and an economic point of view. The resulting “Wessex Novels” edition (1895–1896), published by the firm of Osgood, McIlvaine, had a profound effect on the reception of his texts. The name itself is revealing, in that it demonstrates the increasing emphasis on Hardy’s imaginative re-creation of southwest England. As Simon Gatrell has pointed out, however, “the complex social and environmental organization that readers and critics think of as Hardy’s Wessex did not exist in the novelist’s imagination when he first began to write.”63 Far from possessing any overarching plan to “create” Wessex, Hardy only gradually came to understand its potential as a symbolic landscape and realist device, so that his shaping of it was profoundly retroactive. The Osgood, McIlvaine edition gave him his first chance at a systematic reworking of his novels to make their setting consistent, and to reinforce its centrality in his writing. He thus embarked on a series of textual revisions to bring into line those novels whose original composition had taken place before the concept of Wessex was firm. And revising the texts was not his only strategy. Millgate notes [t]he first volume . . . had a portrait of Hardy as its frontispiece, but the frontispiece to the other volumes all showed relevant Wessex scenes—chosen by Hardy himself in active collaboration with the illustrator—and these combined with the map and the occasional footnotes on topographical and dialectical matters to demonstrate and indeed firmly register Hardy’s claim to be both the originator of Wessex and its only legitimate exploiter.64
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Having staked his claim, Hardy was committed, and it is striking that, given the opportunity to reevaluate his plots, he did not “make any fundamental alterations of structure, story, characterization, or theme”65 in the individual works. It was the consolidation of Wessex that was most important, and he pursued it diligently. Yet while the “Wessex Novels” were crucial in giving Hardy the chance retrospectively to solidify this development, it was the agreement with his later publisher, Macmillan, to produce another collected edition that ensured its influence. The “Wessex Edition” (1912–1931) included not just the novels but also the volumes of poetry that Hardy had produced in the interim, beginning with the first, Wessex Poems (1898). Again, the title of the edition and of the volume of poems indicates just how important Wessex had become; by this point it “was the aspect of his writing that distinguished him most prominently, in the eyes of general readers and critics alike, from the mass of publishing [authors].”66 Once again the texts were revised to make Wessex place names more consistent from novel to novel, while distances and directions between locations were made more accurate in their relationship to Dorset and its surrounding counties, with the overall result that it became easier to identify the originals of buildings, landmarks, and villages within the narratives. The Macmillan collection also provided an expanded map, first drawn by Hardy himself; photographic frontispieces of actual places and landscapes based on Hardy’s specific instructions; and a companion guidebook in a matching binding, Thomas Hardy’s Wessex, illustrated by Hermann Lea and, again, directly approved by Hardy. By this stage Hardy’s acceptance of Wessex as his fictional “brand mark” was complete, and the impact of this transformation on his audience cannot be overstated. Hardy’s decision to accept the mantle of the historian of Wessex has obvious corollaries, not least in his relationship to the realism he at times seemed so determined to resist. By directly linking his fiction to existing sites and places, although always careful to remind his readers that he reserved the right to modify his settings, Hardy encouraged the belief that his books were direct records of a world that exists (or existed) outside of them. That this was often the case, that he explicitly employed locations and occasionally characters he knew from childhood or adulthood, does not alter the complications created by the “Wessexization” of his canon. Novels such as Desperate Remedies and The Hand of Ethelberta, which can only be awkwardly integrated into the rural Wessex template, are implicitly marginalized, and indeed that marginalization was to become more than implicit. Macmillan’s Wessex Edition is crucial in that its revisions establish once and for all the symbolic setting of Hardy’s fiction, even while those revisions encouraged that it be read within a realist context. But it
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THOMAS HARDY, SENSATIONALISM, MELODRAMATIC MODE
is almost equally important that this edition gave Hardy the opportunity to make an “official” statement about his novels that takes this process one step further. Millgate has described the General Preface to the Novels and Poems, published as the prefix to Tess of the d’Urbervilles, the Macmillan collection’s first volume, as Hardy’s “most substantial piece of critical writing, at once a description of his methods and a justification of his literary ambitions.”67 Significantly, Hardy uses the General Preface to divide his fiction into three categories that are “ostensibly descriptive but effectively judgmental.”68 Thus the “Novels of Character and Environment” are those “which approach most nearly to uninfluenced works; also one or two which, whatever their quality in some few of their episodes, may claim a verisimilitude in general treatment and detail.”69 It is no coincidence that the texts grouped under this heading are the six so-called major novels, along with Under the Greenwood Tree, nor that in describing them Hardy uses the word “verisimilitude,” a term that is crucial in realist theory. He has selected the novels that focus most prominently on Wessex, aligned them with realism, defined them as the most “uninfluenced” (i.e., the most uniquely characteristic) of his works, and granted them first-rank status. Hardy supports this later in the Preface by asserting “that the description of these backgrounds [has] been done from the real—that is to say, has something real for its basis, however illusively treated.”70 The result is an after-the-fact acceptance of the realist mode that acts to ensure Hardy’s canonical and critical acceptance by reinforcing his place as a chronicler of truthful human experience based in an actual location. Even as such a categorization reinforces the revisions made for the Osgood, McIlvaine and Macmillan editions, however, it also manages to act as cover for those melodramatic and sensationalist elements of the novels that do not fit the conventional realm of realist portrayal and that have remained quite intentionally unmodified. It is an exaggeration to describe what Hardy is doing here as camouflage, since on one level he wants what he has now constructed as his serious books to be given the kind of consideration meted out to realist texts. Yet even as he positions them for acceptance, his refusal to rewrite them, in the way that James extensively rewrote his early texts for his collected “New York Edition,” indicates a covert resistance to the now status quo paradigms of realism. Nonetheless, if the Novels of Character and Environment are to be given their due, Hardy needs to distinguish them from his other fiction, and he achieves this neatly with the title of his second category, “Romances and Fantasies,” a phrase calculated to suggest a lowering of expectations. Certainly by 1912 to designate a book a romance or a fantasy was to put it thoroughly in its place, and providing such a “sufficiently descriptive
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show a not infrequent disregard of the probable in the chain of events, and depend for their interest mainly on the incidents themselves. They might also be characterized as “Experiments,” and were written for the nonce simply; though despite the artificiality of their fable some of their scenes are not without fidelity to life.72
The faint praise of the last sentence can scarcely undo the damage that has been done to Desperate Remedies, The Hand of Ethelberta, and A Laodicean, since they have been dismissed as improbable, incidental, and ephemeral “experiments,” and a reading of these novels demonstrates the need for this dismissal, since all three emphasize overt elements of melodrama and sensation fiction. Toru Sasaki makes an interesting case that Hardy’s association of “ingenuity” with these texts may in fact be an indirect way of reflecting this connection, since “the word ‘ingenuity’ was often used in reviews of [Wilkie] Collins’s novels,”73 so that on some level Hardy may be both owning up to and yet at the same time disowning influences that he is hesitant to directly acknowledge. In any case, he has put as much space as possible between these books and what he has now identified as his realist texts. Designating them the “third class”74 of his fiction, with all the hierarchical implications of that term, sends a signal to the readers of the Wessex Edition that they are not representative of his work, and need not be held against him. It is therefore accurate to describe the General Preface as a “conscious gesture of canon-formation”75 in which Hardy achieves a significant compromise with realist expectations while at the same time retaining elements of the melodramatic mode that refute those expectations in ways that are distinctively his own. Recently, however, a critical perspective has developed that is fully willing to acknowledge the significance of such elements. Peter Widdowson suggests that there is now “a recognition of just how radically Hardy’s fiction challenges and refutes humanist realism and the whole cultural ideology which informs and sustains it—not only in the ‘minor novels,’ although more explicitly there, but in all the novels,”76 while Linda Shires agrees by arguing that “Hardy is fundamentally anti-realistic . . . Though, as a pre-eminent story-teller, he does not abandon mimesis completely, Hardy undermines the bases of mimetic representation.”77 As well, Widdowson challenges the divisions that have so profoundly shaped Hardy studies, and does so in a way that is central to my argument.
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definition”71 for A Pair of Blue Eyes, The Trumpet-Major, Two on a Tower, and The Well-Beloved all but guarantees they cannot challenge the “true” Wessex novels for a committed reader’s attention. And the final grouping takes this process even further. The “Novels of Ingenuity” are said to
THOMAS HARDY, SENSATIONALISM, MELODRAMATIC MODE
All I wish to indicate is what happens when “minor” novels are reassembled with a writer’s “major” ones, with the evaluative categorizations removed. First, the process of doing so itself exposes how the discrimination of “major” from “minor” texts is achieved, and how a “great writer” is constructed: quite simply, criticism perceives those texts which most fully satisfy its norms and assumptions, and excises those which do not . . . Second, and in conjunction, the replacing of “minor” texts in juxtaposition with “major” ones shows how criticism also suppresses those features of the “major” texts which do not square with its preconceptions (hence “flaws” in the otherwise “great” Tess, for example), and foregrounds those “faults” in the “minor” ones; both of which without the evaluative and comparative categories could be regarded as modal features (“melodrama,” for instance).78
The goal of this book is to create the “juxtaposition” called for by Widdowson more overtly than has yet been done, by pairing Hardy’s three Novels of Ingenuity with three Novels of Character and Environment and demonstrating that the melodramatic imagination is indeed a “modal” feature of his creative aesthetic, and a foundation of his materialist exploration of Victorian society’s flashpoints. Since it is now possible to recognize without insult that melodrama and sensationalism are key elements in many nineteenth-century forms of expression, it is equally possible to observe that Hardy’s novels “represent the apotheosis of the sensation novel,” and that “in writing his own . . . version of the genre, Hardy finds the medium that became uniquely his.”79 Hardy’s sophisticated negotiation (and at times denial) of the critically constructed boundary between mass culture and high art is integral to his success as an author, so that to acknowledge only one part of that complex exchange unnecessarily and mistakenly denies a crucial aspect of his technique as a writer.
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Melodramas of Masculinity—Desperate Remedies and The Mayor of Casterbridge
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Part I
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“ ‘I love you better than any man can’ ”: Sensation Fiction, Class, and Gender Role Anxiety in Desperate Remedies
T
he explanation of why Hardy’s first published novel, Desperate Remedies, is a piece of sensation fiction has become something like received wisdom among Hardy scholars. In the Life, Hardy asserts that his initial attempt at novel writing, The Poor Man and the Lady, was accepted by the firm of Chapman and Hall on the condition “he would guarantee a small sum against loss—say £20,” and that since “[t]he offer on the whole was fair and reasonable . . . Hardy agreed to the guarantee.”1 When the aspiring author wrote some time later to inquire why he had not yet received proofs, Frederick Chapman sent him a note asking whether he would be willing to talk to the reader who had evaluated the manuscript and obtain his advice. Hardy agreed, and although he did not recognize him immediately, he subsequently realized that his evaluator was George Meredith, who proceeded to make a series of recommendations that resulted in Hardy deciding to withdraw the manuscript from consideration. Although “[n]o record was kept . . . of their conversation . . . the gist of it he [Hardy] remembered very well,”2 most crucially Meredith’s suggestion that Hardy “rewrite the story, softening it down considerably; or what would be much better, put it away altogether for the present, and attempt a novel with a . . . more complicated ‘plot.’ ”3 Critics have largely accepted Hardy’s assertion that the tale of illegitimacy, blackmail, suspected bigamy, and murder that resulted came about because he acted “all too literally upon Meredith’s advice,”4 but none have considered how unlikely it would have been for the more senior author to provide such
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MELODRAMAS OF MASCULINITY
advice in the first place. It is revealing that as Chapman’s reader Meredith “declined Mrs. Henry Wood’s East Lynne, which later became tremendously popular,”5 denying the publisher an extremely lucrative best seller. Meredith’s detestation of plot-driven melodrama was well known, and Hadley points out that in his own fiction Meredith “pathologizes the melodramatic mode, turning it into a psychic disturbance in need of a cure . . . In place of a melodrama of telling incident . . . Meredith plots a narrative of psychic development.”6 Further, melodrama’s narrative theory represents character in terms of plot; characters display their qualities and form communities as they react to social events . . . a character in a typical melodramatic narrative does not possess a three-dimensional psychology . . . Such narrative theory is flatly denigrated by Meredith . . . Meredith offers in the place of melodramatic narrative a method that shows plot “growing out of characters” . . . Indeed, Meredith’s psychologized characters take their place within the “realist” tradition that includes George Eliot.7
Given such a dichotomy it is unsurprising that Meredith was often invoked in the sensationalism debates of the 1860s. Justin MacCarthy, writing for the Westminster Review in 1864, observes that “[i]n our own literature Mr. Wilkie Collins is undoubtedly an admirable story-teller. He is not to be compared for a moment with Mr. Meredith in intellect, and fancy, and true perception of human feeling; but he is a good story-teller, and his books are read everywhere, while Mr. Meredith’s novels only extort the half-reluctant admiration of some rare groups of intellectual readers.”8 The scarcely concealed contempt for mere “story-teller[s]” is manifest here, and as Brooks notes “[p]lot has been disdained as the element of narrative that least sets off and defines high art—indeed, plot is that which especially characterizes popular mass-consumption literature.”9 Meredith’s chagrin at not being able to compete with the popularity of the sensationalists, with having his audience restricted to a “half-reluctant” and “rare” group of readers, increased as the decade wore on, and it is this that makes his putative advice to the fledgling novelist sitting before him in 1869 rather puzzling. Of course it is now impossible to know precisely what Meredith said to Hardy, and it is conceivable that he was simply advising him on how to be popular, despite his unwillingness to follow his own prescription. But it seems at least questionable, not to say perverse, that an established and well-known writer would direct a beginner toward an emphasis on “more complicated” plots that he not only did not follow but actively repudiated, and that, when given the chance, he punished through rejecting novels
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such as East Lynne. Hardy’s anecdote about his encounter with Meredith becomes yet one more device to create artistic distance from a text that, many years after the fact, he is anxious to construct as a “melodramatic novel quite below the level of The Poor Man and the Lady,”10 and one that went “quite against his natural grain.”11 With a mature and successful author protesting perhaps a bit too much, all of this begins to look increasingly like an attempt by Hardy to deny the retrospectively unpalatable fact that his first published book is very much with the grain of his subsequent novels, and that forced to reconsider his initial attempt to enter the marketplace of Victorian fiction he fell back on a melodramatic mode that was quite “natural” to him after all. Increasingly, therefore, the idea that Desperate Remedies is a strange, somewhat embarrassing anomaly in Hardy’s canon is losing ground. Indeed, as far back as 1982 Richard H. Taylor was asserting that “it is a better novel, and one more characteristic of Hardy, than has been generally supposed,”12 while Catherine Neale argues “the sensation novel offered Hardy the means of treating sexuality and gender roles . . . and versions of bourgeois identity: concerns that recur throughout his fiction.”13 Most obviously, the novel’s structure is one that appears and reappears throughout Hardy’s fiction: competing suitors court a young woman, and the plot explores the complexities generated by her need to choose between them. But within that structure also lies a standard plotline of melodrama. An economically vulnerable young woman is pursued by a seductively sensual man of aristocratic background, but he is opposed by a stalwartly virtuous man whose unfortunately low social status puts him at a disadvantage in their competition. The young woman loves the virtuous man, but is pressured to give in to the aristocratic cad by her brother and the manipulative lady-of-the-manor. Just when it seems her virtue must be compromised, a series of events unfold that preserve that priceless quality and her brother (seeing the error of his ways) works with the virtuous man to defeat both the seducer and the lady. The threatening characters are vanquished, the heroine marries the hero, and all ends happily. Variations of this narrative were ubiquitous on the nineteenth-century stage, so that “[a] familial drama was . . . entwined with a class drama, as represented in the erotic triangle of upper-class male villain, passive plebeian hero . . . and passive, victimized heroine.”14 Desperate Remedies is interesting, however, because of the way Hardy utilizes this pattern while also collapsing it, so that instead of revealing conflict between disparate classes the novel becomes an exploration of class fluidity. What is striking is the relative sameness of the characters’ social positioning. Edward Springrove as “the son of a farmer”15 is a lower-class hero, but he has been educated to the point that he is trained as an architect, the same position
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MELODRAMAS OF MASCULINITY
held by Ambrose Graye, the father of the heroine, Cytherea Graye, before his death. Indeed, Owen Graye, Cytherea’s brother, is also an architect, and just to complete this fusion, so is Æneus Manston, the novel’s villain and (illegitimate) son of Miss Cytherea Aldclyffe, the lady of Knapwater House. In other words, Hardy uses modified melodramatic conventions to illustrate how class boundaries are beginning to give way, and to illustrate the insecurities that are then created, particularly within middle-class men. As a melodrama the novel revolves around its central female character, and Millgate is right to suggest that Cytherea is “the essential core of the novel.”16 Yet it is important to pay close attention to the way in which Hardy presents those who compete for her attentions. Certainly the novel pits Edward Springrove against Æneas Manston in a direct battle over who will successfully marry her. But then, more daringly, the novel describes Miss Aldclyffe and Own Graye as also competing for her favors. It is these hints of same-sex erotic attraction and incest that give the book its sensational subtext, while at the same time uniting its major themes. As Desperate Remedies twists and turns through its various mysteries and revelations, Hardy uses the conventions of sensation fiction to explore growing Victorian anxieties about masculinity and the status attached to it. By presenting a world in which money and education are increasingly significant, in opposition to birth and family background, the novel explores the difficulty men face in constructing a secure identity in a burgeoning capitalist culture. Cytherea Graye is the catalyst for this, and through their conflict over her the novel’s “heroes,” Owen Graye and Edward Springrove, learn to be properly masculine by defeating the novel’s “villains,” Æneas Manston and the improperly masculine Miss Aldclyffe. The text can thus usefully be discussed in terms of the critical framework that sees masculine identity established and solidified through the male traffic in commodified women. Although the novel might seem to be about Cytherea’s choices, it quickly becomes clear that it is about the various forces that coerce her, as her brother, her two suitors, and her mistress play out their evolving power relationships through her. That is why it is necessary to put prescriptive quotation marks around the words “heroes” and “villains” when describing the sets of people who encircle Cytherea. Such identifications are necessary in terms of audience expectations of melodrama, but finally the novel is profoundly uneasy with the situation it presents, and the “happy ending” that resolves it. The properly masculine is triumphant, but at what cost, and to whose benefit? Hardy, in true sensation fiction style, gives his readers what they want, but in such a way that they end up questioning why they want it, and whether it is such a good thing after all.17 From the very start of his novel-writing career, therefore, Hardy
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can be found exploring controversial elements of gender, and undercutting conventional bourgeois values and aspirations. But since any discussion of masculinity inevitably entails a discussion of femininity, before turning to the novel’s male characters it is necessary to consider its two Cythereas. Almost as threatening as (and perhaps more threatening than) the unmanly man was the unwomanly woman, and at the cultural moment in which the novel appeared “many men harbored . . . the sense that if there were a crisis in masculinity it was primarily due to the fact that women were unilaterally redefining themselves and thereby the relations of both sexes.”18 Eliza Lynn Linton’s essay “The Girl of the Period,” which appeared in the Saturday Review of March 14, 1868, initiated a round of controversy over the assertion that Englishwomen were losing the qualities that had made them “the ideal of womanhood.”19 The debate that followed reinforced a growing sense that masculine and feminine were becoming dangerously confused. In Desperate Remedies the interaction between Cytherea Graye and Cytherea Aldclyffe is the most overtly provocative in the entire text, and it sets the tone for the more covert implications of what follows. Certainly the questionable character of Miss Aldclyffe, whose problematic unmarried status is constantly kept before the reader’s awareness by this designation, is established immediately. Hardy barely bothers to provide the kind of Victorian encoding demanded by Mrs. Grundy when describing her reasons, early in the story, for abruptly rejecting Cytherea’s father’s proposal: there had been some prior flirtation between Cytherea [Aldclyffe] and her cousin, an officer of the line, two or three years before Graye met her, which had suddenly been terminated by the cousin’s departure for India, and the young lady’s travelling on the continent with her parents the whole of the ensuing summer, on account of delicate health. (DR 9)
This not very subtle suggestion of sexual impropriety, and its resulting illegitimate child identified by the euphemistic “delicate health” of the Aldclyffe’s daughter, is supposedly one of the novel’s secrets, but the fact that it is blatantly given away so early suggests it is hardly central to whatever suspense is being generated. Its main purpose is to prepare the reader for the even more shocking examples of improper behavior that will follow. That this behavior is associated with gender transgression is clear from the narrator’s mixed description of Miss Aldclyffe’s physical appearance. She had clear steady eyes, a Roman nose in its purest form, and also the round prominent chin with which the Cæsars are represented in ancient marbles; a mouth expressing a capability for and tendency to strong
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The combination of manly strength and womanly weakness suggests a hybrid nature that cannot be easily categorized, and that therefore creates a dangerous ambiguity. Neale notes that “Miss Aldclyffe is given a number of masculine characteristics,”20 and for most of the early part of the book she displays a forcefulness that would stereotypically be associated with being male, so her discomfort with her biological femaleness is revealed in her first angry confrontation with Cytherea. Having been provoked into calling Miss Aldclyffe “ ‘an ill-tempered unjust woman’ ” (DR 73), Cytherea receives the following violent response: “ ‘A Woman, am I! I’ll teach you if I am a Woman!’ and [she] lifted her hand as if she would strike her companion” (DR 73). Of course what has at least partly incensed Miss Aldclyffe here is Cytherea’s refusal, at this moment of stress, to call her a “lady,” thus challenging her class superiority, and she is right to feel insecure in her status. One of the reasons Ambrose Graye felt some confidence in his original courtship of Cytherea Aldclyffe was that her parents, despite her mother coming from “an ancient family whose genealogical tree was interlaced with some of the most illustrious and wellknown in the kingdom” (DR 7), had no financial resources to reinforce their nominal social preeminence, and had in fact “lost all confidence in nobility of birth, without money to give effect to its presence” (DR 8). The only reason Miss Aldclyffe can play the lady at all is that “very singularly the other branch of the family died out one by one—three of them, and Miss Aldclyffe’s great uncle left all his property, including the estate, to . . . Miss Aldclyffe’s father and mother—on condition they took the old family name as well” (DR 75–76). Miss Aldclyffe is very much nouveau riche, and her ostensible nobility, problematically passed to her through her mother’s line, is equally newly minted. She thus further reinforces the novel’s examination of how the rising cash culture of Victorian England is disrupting class distinctions, for confronted by the middle-class accomplishments and graces of Cytherea Graye, servant or no, Miss Aldclyffe’s status supremacy is revealed as conditional on economic considerations that can be, and will prove to be, extremely volatile. But her masculine threat to give Cytherea a blow adds something else to her rejection of being merely “a woman.” As the novel demonstrates, Cytherea Aldclyffe is indeed unladylike and unwomanly in her aggressive reactions, and in her rejection of the passive, self-repressive role that defined proper Victorian female behavior. Her willingness to indulge her desires, to plot and scheme, and to flirt with criminality is
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emotion, habitually controlled by pride. There was a severity about the lower outlines of the face which gave a masculine cast to this portion of her countenance. Womanly weakness was nowhere visible save in one part—the curve of her forehead and brows; there it was clear and emphatic. (DR 54–55)
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suitably sensational, and places her solidly in the tradition of her precursors Lucy Audley and Magdalen Vanstone. Even Braddon and Collins, however—veteran writers of sensation fiction though they were—never gave their readers anything quite as risqué as what Hardy now provides: the (in)famous “bedroom scene” between the older and younger woman. The controversy over what occurs when Miss Aldclyffe and Cytherea end up in the same bed together has in some ways exercised modern Hardy critics more than it did his nineteenth-century contemporaries. Paul Turner, in his biography of Hardy, flatly asserts that nothing untoward is happening: “At one point Miss Aldclyffe makes what nowadays look like Lesbian advances to Cytherea. Nothing could have been further from the author’s or his publisher’s mind.”21 But Turner’s resolute refusal to quote any portion of the text to support his position suggests that he is uncomfortable with the conflict between what he apparently knows was on the author’s mind and what went down on the page. More convincing is Rosemarie Morgan’s close reading of the scene, which argues that “the emphasis is upon their powerful physical attraction to each other and the electric passion that flashes between them . . . In Miss Aldclyffe’s bedroom, they talk heatedly while gazing admiringly on each other’s bodies.”22 Hardy is quite explicit about why Miss Aldclyffe, in the face of Cytherea’s complete lack of experience as a lady’s maid, and thus complete lack of references, offers her the job. We are told that she is “struck with her companion’s appearance,” and in particular it is the “voluptuousness” of Cytherea’s face that she notices (DR 54). Then, as she tries to convince herself to hire this absolutely inappropriate young woman, she murmurs to herself “ ‘It is almost worth while to be bored with instructing her in order to have a creature who could glide round my luxurious indolent body in that manner, and look at me in that way—I warrant how light her fingers are upon one’s head and neck’ ” (DR 56). The erotic charge here is quite obvious, and in her heated emotional state during the quarrel scene already mentioned Miss Aldclyffe inadvertently confesses her attraction to Cytherea: “ ‘The idea of my taking a girl without asking her more than three questions, or having a single reference, all because of her good l—, the shape of her face and body!’ ” (DR 73). Miss Aldclyffe’s reaction to Cytherea clearly has a sexual component, and in setting up the situation that will lead to their encounter in bed Hardy implies about as directly as possible what initiates her desire. Cytherea, refusing to be browbeaten, defies her employer, which leads to the following description. Cytherea, red and panting, took up her candlestick and advanced to the table to get a light. Standing close to them the rays from the candles struck sharply on her face. She usually bore a much stronger likeness to her mother than to
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Cytherea, in her “passionate mood,” resembles her father, Miss Aldclyffe’s former lover,23 and the man she would have married if not for her improper past. This masculine woman is given the chance to enact her previously thwarted passions, from a position of dominance, in a way that society cannot impede because the kind of relationship she is projecting removes her from the expectations and roles heterosexuality demands. There is no fear of pregnancy here, no worry about marriage, or indeed loss of reputation, since the period allows women wide latitude in emotional and physical expression. And that Hardy is aware of this is clear from the statement “[i]t was perceived by the servants of the House, that some secret bond of connexion existed between Miss Aldclyffe and her companion. But they were woman and woman, not woman and man, the facts were ethereal and refined, and so they could not be worked up into a taking story” (DR 111). It is important to note the device employed here, which Morgan usefully describes as the “bystander narrator.”24 That is, a narrative voice that describes the limited responses of certain characters, in this case the servants, and accepts the position described. This strategy establishes a distance between the naïve bystander narrator and the novel’s actual narrator, who has a much more sophisticated view of things, and whose descriptions and tone are considerably more direct. The bystander’s view “coheres with Victorian orthodoxies but not with Hardy’s narrator who, being temporarily displaced by the interloper, has not at any point suggested that the facts do not exist.”25 The possibility of same-sex erotic attraction is thus established by being left unspoken, at least by those who cannot imagine the possibility. Ironically critics such as Turner, in their efforts to keep Hardy’s text clear of such sexual possibilities, echo the denials of this naïve narrator. When Miss Aldclyffe appears outside Cytherea’s bedroom door, and demands entrance, the text declares “[i]t was now mistress and maid no longer; woman and woman only,” and “[t]he instant they were in bed Miss Aldclyffe freed herself from the last remnant of restraint. She flung her arms round the young girl, and pressed her gently to her heart. ‘Now kiss me,’ she said” (DR 79).26 Her growing insistence that Cytherea return her kisses with equal ardor and the frustration that results when she does not lead to a direct expression of jealousy and sexual ownership.
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her father, but now, looking with a grave, reckless, and angered expression of countenance at the kindling wick as she held it slanting into the other flame, her father’s features were distinct in her. It was the first time Miss Aldclyffe had seen her in a passionate mood, and wearing that expression which was invariably its concomitant. It was Miss Aldclyffe’s turn to start now. (DR 74)
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Miss Aldclyffe shifted her ground. “Were you ever in love?” she inquired, suddenly. Cytherea was surprised to hear how quickly the voice had altered from tenderness to harshness, vexation, and disappointment. “Yes—I think I was—once,” she murmured.
A pause. “Well, were you?” said Miss Aldclyffe, rather sharply. “Don’t press me to tell—I can’t—indeed, I won’t, madam.” Miss Aldclyffe removed her arms from Cytherea’s neck. “Tis now with you as it is always with all girls,” she said, in jealous and gloomy accents. “You are not, after all, the innocent I took you for. No, no.”
She then changes her tone with fitful rapidity. “Cytherea, try to love me more than you love him—do. I love you better than any man can. Do, Cythie; don’t let any man stand between us. Oh, I can’t bear that!” She clasped Cytherea’s neck again. (DR 82)27
Clearly what Miss Aldclyffe cannot brook is the idea of a male rival, and she is “as jealous as any man could have been” (DR 84). This is the heart of the threat that Cytherea Aldclyffe poses in the novel, and that such improper women pose in general. Her attempt to compete with Springrove as a lover symbolizes her attempt to compete with men in their patriarchal power, and thus endangers conceptions of masculinity both sexual and social. Hardy drives the connection home by having Miss Aldclyffe’s father die, in the room directly below them, the very night the two women are in bed together. As Joe Fisher points out, this results in the freeing up of the Knapwater estate, so that “as the lesbian episode dangerously and prematurely implies, the full force of women holding patrilinear inheritances in a patriarchy is released.”28 This literal “death of the father” reinforces his daughter’s rejection of all male constraints at the moment in which she is expressing her autonomy most subversively, through an intense erotic response to another woman. Unsurprisingly, then, in the aftermath of their passionate encounter and the shocking news of the next morning “Miss Aldclyffe held [Cytherea] almost as a lover would have held her” (DR 95), but by this point that decorous “almost” carries very little weight. In its scathing review of Desperate Remedies on April 22, 1871, the Spectator
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spurns Miss Aldclyffe as “a miserable creation—uninteresting, unnatural, and nasty,”29 and in those last two adjectives may be read a wealth of meaning. Her presentation as a manly woman challenges the novel’s Victorian audience and disrupts its expectations in ways that were very disturbing at this cultural moment, although finally her threat is neutralized. Part of what makes her so frightening before that occurs, however, is the parallel ambiguities of the protagonists who confront her, since their own situations also reflect the uncertainties of the period. To move from a discussion of Miss Aldclyffe to an examination of Owen Graye might at first seem severely anticlimactic. Certainly nothing as obviously sensational as the bedroom scene is associated with him. Yet within the novel’s gender discourse he is as problematic as the older Cytherea. The difference between them is that while she is destroyed by her impropriety, he is given the chance to be “redeemed” through learning to be a man. Before that process is complete, however, the text puts him through a series of humiliating experiences that demonstrate just how precarious the establishment of masculinity can be. The novel’s action is initiated by the fall from a church tower of Owen and Cytherea’s father. This literally fatal plunge also plunges the two of them into a financial and social crisis, since Ambrose Graye squandered all his money and left his children with a mass of debts to be paid. Owen thus finds himself the head of a small family facing a threat of class/economic degradation that he is ill-prepared to confront. As he struggles to come up with some solution to their dilemma “unpleasant remarks . . . were floating around them every day. The undoubted truth [was] . . . that the daughter had been brought up to no profession—[and] that the son who had, had made no progress in it, and might come to the dogs” (DR 17). This public humiliation, which calls into question Owen’s masculine role as a provider, is reinforced by Cytherea’s increasingly desperate attempts to find employment. The advertisements she places range from the at least marginally respectable description of “A YOUNG LADY . . . desirous of meeting with an ENGAGEMENT as GOVERNESS or COMPANION” (DR 22), to the considerably less prestigious desire for a position as “NURSERY GOVERNESS OR USEFUL COMPANION,” with the addendum that she is “a good needle-woman” (DR 39), to her final willingness to describe herself as “LADY’S MAID. Inexperienced” (DR 50). Owen’s reaction to this last attempt, “Such a disgrace” (DR 50), is clearly as much a comment on his own position as it is on his sister’s, and demonstrates his growing perception of failure. As a middle-class Victorian man Owen’s sense of self rests on two connected foundations: professional status, and the ability to financially support female relatives through that status. As an unskilled and
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unemployed architect he has neither, and the result is that his masculine credentials are called into question from the very beginning of the story. Then, with the introduction of Edward Springrove, Owen’s masculinity is further challenged. The job that Owen finally acquires is almost as demeaning as his lack of employment, since instead of being taken on as an architectural pupil he is hired to “trace drawings, and attend to other subsidiary work of the kind” (DR 19) for two months, an occupation that his employer specifically identifies as an “inferior position” (DR 19). He finds himself under the supervision of Springrove, whose role as head clerk reinforces Owen’s fall in status.30 Owen’s original description of Springrove is obviously an attempt to bolster his own increasingly fragile worth: “ ‘He seems a very nice fellow indeed; though of course I can hardly tell to a certainty as yet. But I think he’s a very worthy fellow . . . though he’s not a public school man he has read widely’ ” (DR 24). The balancing act going on here requires Owen to present Springrove as admirable (since if he is not what does that say about his underling?) while at the same time putting Springrove in his place by insisting on the lack of social rank that comes with being “not a public school man.” Their growing friendship, therefore, has an underlying tension that remains carefully unstated by Owen, although the text will very shortly make it overt. Springrove is not, at least to begin with, a particularly masculine man, yet Owen Graye’s vulnerability in this respect makes Springrove more than sufficient to generate a series of anxieties that fuel his insecurity. It is Cytherea’s growing interest in his friend, however, that will bring Owen’s internal conflict to a crisis. If there is one area in which Owen might still exert his masculine prerogative it is in guiding his sister’s choice of husband. As her brother he would have had some say in the matter anyway, but now, as both brother and father figure, the responsibility is solely his. Yet his loss of social and economic status has severely curtailed his leverage here as well. On exactly what grounds would Owen turn away a potential suitor? Cytherea thus becomes the locus of Owen’s one chance to reassert his patriarchal power and the potentially devastating final demonstration that he has none at all. And it is here that Hardy introduces a sensational element that may be even more revealing than same-sex female attraction. Patrick Roberts observes that while it is “a common pattern for a lover to step into a brother’s shoes as the sister matures . . . the extent to which Springrove and Owen exchange roles in the course of the novel is very striking . . . The repetition of this pattern in Desperate Remedies seems to be a device for introducing an erotic aspect into a familial . . . situation.”31 What the text generates is an Owen-Cytherea-Springrove erotic triangle that, in its echo of the Miss Aldclyffe-Cytherea-Springrove triangle, provides an incest motif to
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go along with the lesbianism of the bedroom scene. Of course no actual incestuous exchange takes place between Owen and his sister, but in both psychological and gender terms this triangular relationship has strong interpretive potential. Most significantly, it helps explain the mysterious injury that haunts Owen throughout much of the text, and that can only be cured once he has successfully (re)negotiated his masculinity. It is no coincidence that this injury surfaces during the scene that presents the first of the “interchanges” between Owen and Springrove mentioned by Roberts. During their steamboat excursion to Lewborne Bay,32 Owen and Cytherea separate when Owen decides to walk an additional two or three miles to view a medieval ruin. This makes him late for the return steamer, and Cytherea, “in a fever of distress lest [he] should be left behind” (DR 28–29), strains her eyes looking for him. When she finally spots “the half-hidden figure of a man who was seen advancing at a headlong pace down the ravine which lay between the heath and the shore” (DR 29) she assumes it is her brother, only to find when turning to him on the boat with a relieved “O Owen, I am so glad you are come” that the “man was not her brother, but a total stranger” (DR 30). This mysterious figure then explains the situation. “I am Mr. Springrove. I passed Humdon Castle about half an hour ago, and soon afterwards met your brother going that way. He had been deceived in the distance, and was about to turn without seeing the ruin, on account of a lameness that had come on in his leg or foot. I proposed that he should go on, since he had got so near; and afterwards, instead of walking back to the boat, get across to Galworth Station—a shorter walk for him—where he could catch the late train, and go directly home. I could let you know what he had done, and allay any uneasiness.” (DR 30–31)
A trip that originally held no apparent romantic possibilities has suddenly taken on the trappings of courtship, and the narrator confirms what has happened by stating that “a clear penetrating ray of intelligence had shot from each into each, giving birth to one of those unaccountable sensations which carry home to the heart . . . the conviction ‘A tie has begun to unite us’ ” (DR 31–32). When the steamer docks Springrove offers to walk Cytherea to the station in order to meet Owen, only to find that the train that was to have brought him back is not scheduled to arrive until the next day. Although Springrove declares he is “very sorry” he “misled” Owen (DR 32), the reader might well wonder at this point just how sorry he is. Cytherea denies Springrove’s subsequent request to walk her to her door, an act that would amount to a declaration of romantic interest on both sides, but the encounter has proven “pleasant and . . . enkindling” (DR 33)
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for each of them. Given that the whole process that led to Owen’s nonappearance at the steamboat and railway station arises from Springrove’s suggestions, a suspicious reader might wonder about his motives from the start. Springrove has become Owen’s rival for Cytherea. In a slightly different context this scene could easily be construed as one suitor taking advantage of a competing suitor’s weakness and outmaneuvering him to gain an opportunity to pursue the woman they both desire. Thus Owen’s reaction when his sister’s relationship with Springrove is revealed is suitably ambivalent: “ ‘’Twas a shame of him to win you away from me, and cruel of you to keep the growth of this attachment a secret’ ” (DR 49). Is this a thwarted brother, or a thwarted lover, speaking? Eve Sedgwick’s discussion of the theories of René Girard is useful here. She observes that he “traced a calculus of power that was structured by the relation of rivalry between the two active members of an erotic triangle,” 33 and a “calculus of power” is precisely what Owen and Springrove are working out. Owen is rapidly losing what little male power he has left, and the supplanting of him in his sister’s life threatens a final emasculation. Unsurprisingly, as Springrove and Cytherea’s love is established what can only be called Owen’s oedipal lameness moves from an occasional irritant to a debilitating handicap. The symbolic castration that the injury represents combines the taboo incestuous drive that positions him as an erotic rival for his sister’s affections with the increasing anxiety that he is a failure as a man, and unless he can resolve both elements he stands no chance of successful social or psychic integration. Although such a reading may seem anachronistic for a text published in 1870, this is just the kind of material sensation fiction was uniquely positioned to explore, and Desperate Remedies “depicts a world of the unconscious often discerned in popular fiction in particular . . . [and is] a text which deliberately lends expression to sexual impulse.”34 It is not difficult to demonstrate that what is troubling Owen is more than a sprain. He describes it as “that mysterious pain which comes just above my ankle sometimes” (DR 147), and leaving aside the obvious connection of such leg pain to the Oedipus story, repeated attempts to find a physiological explanation for his limp end in failure. An original diagnosis of “rheumatism” is rejected, to be replaced by the assertion that “rheumatism was not the disease after all, but erysipelas” (DR 211). Owen then later informs his sister that the “doctors find they are on the wrong tack. They cannot make out what the disease is” (DR 211). Finally, he writes to Cytherea, “three practitioners between them have at last hit the nail on the head, I hope. They probed the place, and discovered that the secret lay in the bone. I underwent an operation for its removal three days ago” (DR 212). What is interesting about this explanation is that it is
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no explanation at all. The ailment affecting Owen remains a “secret,” and the removal of an unspecified “bone” is disconcertingly vague, not to say alarming. Although Hardy cannot state it directly, Owen’s wound is obviously psychological, and so it is predictable that even after the “successful” operation his recovery is slow. Perhaps equally predictable, then, is that his recovery speeds up considerably as Owen reestablishes control over his sister. By this point in the novel Æneas Manston has appeared and begun plotting with Miss Aldclyffe to cut out Springrove and bring about his own marriage to Cytherea. Since Owen’s injury has placed him and his sister in even worse financial straits, the most obvious avenue of manipulation is to create a sense of obligation in Cytherea, a strategy that another of Hardy’s melodramatic villains, Alec d’Urberville, will employ with equal effect in a much later novel. Cytherea’s crippled brother finds that a wheeled chair has been hired for his use, and that a formerly importunate creditor is in no hurry to be paid, because Manston has guaranteed the loan. And the steward of Knapwater House does not hesitate to make the transaction he is proposing overt: “ ‘Miss Graye, I will not mince matters—I love you— you know it . . . Consent to be my wife at any time that may suit you . . . and you shall find [your brother] well provided for’ ” (DR 213). More intriguing, however, is how quickly Owen becomes Manston’s advocate and joins in the emotional/financial blackmail. In a letter to Cytherea he challenges her by saying “Can’t you love him? Why not? Try, for he is a good, and not only that but a talented man . . . do you see any way of escape from [your present life] except by marriage? I don’t” (DR 220). When his coercion succeeds and Cytherea finally accepts Manston’s proposal, she is specific about her motives: “Why do I marry him?” she said to herself. “Because Owen, dear Owen my brother, wishes me to marry him. Because Mr. Manston is and has been, uniformly kind to Owen and to me. ‘Act in obedience and the dictates of common sense,’ Owen said, ‘and dread the sharp sting of poverty’ . . . ’Twas right I suppose, for him to say that.” (DR 226)
Having brought about this match, Owen goes to live with Manston, with the result that “[c]ontrary to the opinion of the doctors, the wound had healed after the first surgical operation, and his leg was gradually acquiring strength” (DR 228). By taking Cytherea “away” from Springrove he defeats the rival who embodies his sense of inferiority, and shifts the calculus of power in their triangle in his favor. Also, by giving Cytherea “to” Manston he confirms his patriarchal right to determine who marries his sister, and thus again empowers his masculine identity as the coercive
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arbiter of her female fate. It is no wonder that his “leg” begins to acquire strength. But the process does not stop there. Owen is now under an obligation to Manston, since it is his money that has freed him and his sister. This makes Manston a threat, and almost as soon as the marriage is completed Owen begins to have second thoughts about it: “Owen was driven back to the Old House. But he could not rest in the lonely place. His conscience began to reproach him for having forced on the marriage of his sister with a little too much peremptoriness” (DR 242). Now it is Manston who is the rival, and when Owen begins to suspect him of bigamy he is galvanized to reclaim Cytherea in particularly possessive terms: “ ‘Manston has no right to carry off my sister unless he’s her husband,’ said Owen, ‘I shall go and separate them’ ” (DR 247). Owen brings an energy to exposing his brotherin-law that seems completely out of character, declaring “ ‘If I could only bring him to ruin as a bigamist—supposing him to be one, I should die happy. That’s what we must find out by fair means or foul—was he a willful bigamist’ ” (DR 284). His role as protector of his sister’s honor allows him to successfully sublimate whatever inappropriate erotic responses have been driving him, and this becomes overt when he actually does separate Cytherea from her husband. Owen had gone to the door of Cytherea’s room. “Cytherea, darling—’tis Owen,” he said, outside the door. A rustling of clothes, soft footsteps, and a voice saying from the inside, “Is it really you, Owen—is it really?” “It is.” “O, will you take care of me!” “Always.” (DR 259)
Owen’s final cure is fueled by a desire to defeat Manston in the way he had earlier defeated Springrove: by demonstrating his control over the men and relationships surrounding his sister. What might be called a recovery through male conflict ensures that his masculinity is confirmed. Because Springrove is no longer a threat, he can now become an ally, and the two of them unite to hunt down and destroy Manston. In the meantime, Cytherea has become more and more passive, more and more marginalized, as the men who encompass her use her to determine their own masculine status. This behavior fits neatly into Sedgwick’s assertion that “in the presence of a woman who can be seen as pitiable or contemptible, men are able to exchange power and to confirm each other’s value even in the context
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of the remaining inequalities in their power.”35 Owen’s restored manhood allows for the eventual union of his friend and his sister and, as the narrator makes clear, a concomitant rise in economic security and status: “Owen Graye’s recovery from the illness that had incapacitated him for so long a time was, professionally, the dawn of a brighter prospect for him in every direction . . . With the lengthening of the days, and the revival of building operations for the forthcoming season, he saw himself, for the first time, on a road . . . to a comfortable income” (DR 273). After such an in-depth discussion of Owen Graye, it is not really necessary to go into the same kind of detail with Desperate Remedies’ other hero, since Edward Springrove moves through a similar pattern of disempowerment and reempowerment. There are some significant variations, however. To begin with, Springrove is not just one side of an erotic triangle involving another man; he is also the apogee of an erotic triangle involving two women. Springrove’s engagement to his cousin Adelaide Hinton, which he conceals from Cytherea as he finds himself attracted to her, suggests a sexual power that reinforces the masculine ability to transfer affection from one potential partner to another without cost to reputation. Yet the text hints at qualities in Springrove that demonstrate he is not as secure as he may seem. In an echo of Miss Aldclyffe’s ambiguous physical description, we are told that “[a]lthough the upper part of his face and head was handsomely formed, and bounded by lines of sufficiently masculine regularity, his brows were somewhat too softly arched, and finely penciled for one of his sex” (DR 31). At one point the narrator informs us that “Springrove was wanting in the assurance of many men of his age” (DR 39–40), and later he confesses to Cytherea that he lacks the “certain kind of energy” (DR 44) needed to become fully successful in his work. This has caused Patricia Ingham to describe him as “spiritless,” and to note the way in which he “passively” allows events to shape his responses,36 so that like Owen, Springrove’s gender and professional weakness are combined. Just as Miss Aldclyffe has an improperly masculine element to her character, Springrove has an improperly feminine aspect to his, at least in Victorian terms. It is this imbalance that must be corrected before he can achieve his goal of marrying Cytherea, but Hardy complicates this resolution by, for much of the novel, causing his involvement with her to actually debilitate rather than enhance his masculinity. While Springrove has only Owen as his rival for Cytherea he is not much at risk, since Owen’s weaknesses contrast with Springrove’s strengths. But with the appearance of Manston things change dramatically. Aided by Miss Aldclyffe, Manston quickly and efficiently defeats Springrove on practically every level. They are in direct competition for the position of steward of the Knapwater estate, and the job is given to Manston. This allows him
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greater access to Cytherea, a situation of which he quickly takes advantage. When Cytherea’s affections are not so easily swayed, Miss Aldclyffe moves to ensure Springrove’s removal, and in a single interview manipulates him into accepting “that Cytherea indeed loved the steward” (DR 199). Springrove is convinced to suspend his courtship of Cytherea, which leads to her marriage to Manston. Although that union is almost immediately called into question, there can be no doubt about how the power relations in this particular triangle have played themselves out. Manston effectively emasculates Springrove by demonstrating, beyond doubt, which of them is the better man: he takes away both his potential employment and his potential wife. The narrator’s description of Springrove late in the novel reinforces that effect: “He stood in the doorway with the same black bag in his hand, and the same old grey cloak on his shoulders, that he had worn 15 months earlier when returning on the night of the fire. This appearance of his conveyed a true impression; he had become a stagnant man” (DR 320). Ironically, Springrove’s pursuit of Cytherea teaches him what it is like to be Cytherea; his stagnation reflects her immobility and powerlessness. The text demonstrates the danger to masculine identity in competing for women, for “to be feminized or suffer gender confusion within a framework that includes a woman . . . is dire; and . . . any erotic involvement with an actual woman threatens to be unmanning.”37 What Springrove requires is the recovery of the masculine prerogatives he possessed at the beginning of the novel, and the way to achieve this is to confront Manston directly, thus removing the dangerous effeminacy in his character that his desire for Cytherea has exacerbated. Just as Owen’s limp is alleviated by his efforts to expose Manston, so is Springrove’s stagnancy. Both men are galvanized by their attempt to prove his bigamy, and when he is revealed to be a murderer instead their hunt becomes even more intense. Inevitably a direct and melodramatic physical confrontation between Springrove and Manston occurs, a confrontation that tellingly takes place over Cytherea’s unconscious body. Kristin Brady notes this heroine’s tendency to swoon at moments of crisis, demonstrating “the inherent fragility of her female body,”38 and her fainting spell here is particularly symbolic. As the three points of this erotic triangle come together in a last explosive encounter, the female object of the conflict is reduced to complete passivity, suitably objectified as Springrove and Manston struggle to determine supremacy. A desperate wrestle now began between the two men. Manston was the taller, but there was in Edward much hard tough muscle which the delicate flesh of the steward lacked. They flew together like the jaws of a gin. In a minute they were both on the floor, rolling over and over, locked in each other’s grasp
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Although Springrove does not technically win this fight, he does restrain Manston long enough for three other men to arrive and capture him. Springrove’s reward is to have Cytherea placed in a thoroughly female position of dependence upon him. Having awoken during the fight and run for help, only to collapse once again a short way down the lane, Cytherea is restored when Springrove “ran up and lifted her in his arms, and thus aided she was enabled to stand upright—clinging to him” (DR 360). The character’s restored masculinity, achieved through a physical attack on his rival, expels that rival and also restores the proper alignment of male and female. Edward’s desire for Cytherea therefore no longer produces any gender anxiety, and their union is assured. The putative heroes of Desperate Remedies embody what for most of the novel might be described as masculinity under threat. They illustrate the precarious nature of masculine identity, and the ways in which class status, economics, and erotic responses both conscious and unconscious can subvert that identity in overwhelming ways. As well, Owen Graye and Edward Springrove show that the apprehension generated is often the result of engagements with women, or in this case, with one particular woman. The way to deal with it, therefore, is to ensure that that woman remains safely and completely under control, so her disruptive potential remains unrealized. Cytherea is the unwitting source of, and the equally unwitting solution to, the problem of constructing masculinity in the text, but as its heroine she can hardly be presented as such. Instead the threat, and the anxiety, is displaced onto its villain Æneas Manston, the character against whom Owen and Springrove can, and do, direct their animus as a confirmation of their manliness. Manston is a repository for all the elements of problematic masculinity in the text, and David Ball observes that “the detailed description of his beauty emphasizes its feminine qualities.”39 He was an extremely handsome man . . . The most striking point in his appearance was the wonderful, almost preternatural, clearness of his complexion. There was not a blemish or speck of any kind to mar the smoothness of its surface or the beauty of its hue . . . Eyes and forehead both would have expressed keenness of intellect too severely to be pleasing, had their force not been counteracted by the lines and tone of the lips. These were full and luscious to a surprising degree, possessing a woman-like softness of curve, and a ruby redness so intense as to testify strongly to much susceptibility of heart where feminine beauty was concerned. (DR 127–128)
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as tightly as if they had been one organic being at war with itself—Edward trying to secure Manston’s arms with a small thong he had drawn from his pocket, Manston trying to reach his knife. (DR 360)
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This might seem to reprise Springrove’s opening description, which also suggested effeminacy, but where Edward is weakened by a kind of female passivity, Manston suffers no such drawback. Miss Aldclyffe’s lawyer, when evaluating him for the job of steward, astutely argues that Manston is “ ‘a voluptuary with activity; which is a very bad form of man—as bad as it is rare’ ” (DR 109), thus noting his dangerous union of womanly sensuality with manly aggressiveness. It is appropriate that Manston turns out to be Miss Aldclyffe’s illegitimate son, for he is a gender-reversed version of her. But because he is male he also possesses an empowerment she never can, despite her acquired rank and wealth. Neale and other critics have recognized that Hardy has “cast Manston as some kind of phallic principle,”40 so that no matter how improperly feminine his mother may be she can never match his scope for sexual action. This is represented by his suspected bigamous relationship with Cytherea, and by his ability, when his plots require it, to bring in yet a third woman he has seduced to assist him. Hardy modifies sensation fiction’s recurrent use of bigamy in its narratives in two ways. First, unlike Braddon’s Lady Audley or Aurora Floyd, Manston is not actually a bigamist—because he has accidentally killed his first wife. As well, and perhaps more importantly, sensation novels tended to focus on female bigamy as a way of exploring dangerously subversive female desire.41 Hardy’s decision to hint at male bigamy not only reinforces his character’s link to the female, at least in the genre he is following, but also suggests the steward’s problematically passionate temperament. Manston’s hypersexuality intimidates and undercuts Owen and Springrove, and the scene that most obviously demonstrates its questionable nature takes place when heroine and villain first meet. If the “bedroom scene” between Cytherea and Miss Aldclyffe is the most provocative one in the novel, the “organ scene” between Cytherea and Manston places a close second. Seeing Cytherea in danger of being caught in an impending thunderstorm, Manston invites her to take shelter in the old manor house that, as steward, is his new residence. The gothic setting and tempestuous weather instantly create sexual tension, and in the porch their clothing comes into contact. His clothes are something exterior to every man; but to a woman her dress is part of her body . . . By the slightest hyperbole it may be said that her dress has sensation . . . Delicate antennæ, or feelers, bristle on every outlying frill. Go to the uppermost: she is there; tread on the lowest: the fair creature is there almost before you. Thus the touch of clothes, which was nothing to Manston, sent a thrill through Cytherea, seeing, moreover, that he was of the nature of a mysterious stranger. She looked out again at the storm, but still felt him. (DR 128–129)
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“An organ?” “Yes, an organ. I made it myself, except the pipes. I opened the case this afternoon to commence soothing myself at once. It is not a very large one, but quite big enough for a private house. You play, I dare say?” “The piano. I am not at all used to an organ.” “You would soon acquire the touch for an organ, though it would spoil your touch for the piano. Not that that matters a great deal. A piano isn’t much as an instrument.” (DR 129)
It hardly needs the information that from the mid-1830s on the word organ was routinely used in the phrase sexual organ to see that this is more than a music lesson. Yet even as Manston appears to be inviting Cytherea to “acquire the touch for an organ,” he quickly demonstrates his willingness to play solo. He has already informed Cytherea that he was playing it earlier to “soothe” himself, and shortly after this he tells her that he “ ‘play[s] for my private amusement only . . . I have never learned scientifically. All I know is what I taught myself ’ ” (DR 130). The masturbatory implications of this statement are obvious, and the entire scene suggests that Manston’s sexuality is essentially narcissistic. The description of the performance he proceeds to give for Cytherea, punctuated as it is by “thunder, lightening, and rain [which] had now increased to a terrific force . . . [and] darts, forks, zigzags, and balls of fire” (DR 130), reads like a transcription of the sensation scenes so common in Victorian stage melodrama, and the impact on his female listener is explicit. He played more powerfully. Cytherea had never heard music in the completeness of full orchestral power, and the tones of the organ . . . moved her to a degree out of proportion to the actual power of the mere notes, practiced as was the hand that produced them. The varying strains . . . shook and bent her to themselves, as a gushing brook shakes and bends a shadow cast across its surface . . . She was swayed into emotional opinions concerning the strange man before her; new impulses . . . entered into her with a gnawing thrill. A dreadful flash of lightning then, and the thunder close upon it. She found herself involuntarily shrinking up beside him, and looking with parted lips at his face. (DR 131–132)
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The eroticization of her clothing clearly suggests Cytherea’s arousal by this “mysterious stranger,” and although the “thrill” that passes through her is not shared by Manston, he quickly proceeds to derive his own satisfaction from the situation. The conversation that takes place as they move into the house is filled with suggestive exchanges centered on the instrument Manston now displays. Having shown her his newly unpacked organ, he and Cytherea have the following conversation:
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This passage foreshadows Tess Durbeyfield’s orgasmic response to Angel Clare’s harp, but it is a real question whether the performer here cares much about his audience. Fisher is right to suggest that “Manston’s autoeroticism gives a pejorative and accurate introduction to his character; and so does his . . . notion of foreplay, [which] metaphorically turn[s] the woman into an unwilling voyeur while he masturbates his ‘organ.’ ”42 Cytherea’s arousal is clear, and it aligns Hardy with the “medical minority at the time who thought women capable of sexual feeling,”43 but once again she is reduced to watching a man derive satisfaction through her, not with her. The steward of Knapwater House’s power over women is undeniable, yet far from celebrating this particular embodiment of masculinity the text, in true melodramatic/sensationalist fashion, rejects him as too dangerous. Manston is handsome but not handsome in the right way, sexual but not sexual in the right way, and, in his scheming pursuit of Cytherea, aggressive but not aggressive in the right way. His willingness to use Miss Aldclyffe to further his courtship by manipulating Cytherea, not to mention the calculating way in which he disposes of his wife’s body, certainly reveals a man of action, but hardly one that the reader is encouraged to admire. Finally, therefore, the text presents Manston as masculine, but not masculine in the right way. Because his “masculinity is unsublimated”44 and cannot be safely integrated into the constraints of Victorian society, he becomes a disruptive force that must be contained. His final defeat by Owen and Springrove, and his eventual suicide, achieves this containment, but the reader feels a sense of uneasiness with the closure that defeat achieves. Manston’s suicide note, which provides his “Last Words” (DR 364) and acts as his confession, gives additional insight into the circumstances of his villainy that creates an uneasy tension in the reader, and a potential to sympathize with the conventionally “wrong” character that is typical of sensation fiction. Further, as Booth notes, “[t]he villain is the active principle of melodrama,”45 so there is a significant textual deflation in the novel once he is contained. Miss Aldclyffe, whose influence within the story undergoes a steady decline with the appearance of Manston, experiences a parallel physical decline that culminates in her sudden death upon hearing of her son’s. These fatalities may remove the two major obstacles to a traditional happy conclusion, but they also remove the two major sources of dramatic energy, making Cytherea’s inevitable marriage to Springrove severely anticlimactic. And finally the reason for this ambivalence is that Manston the villain has, in many ways, embodied the same urges and attitudes as the novel’s heroes, thus becoming a comment both on them and on the masculine world they represent. His illegitimately adulterous desire for
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DESPERATE REMEDIES
MELODRAMAS OF MASCULINITY
Cytherea mirrors Owen’s illegitimately incestuous desire, and his “twotiming” of her mirrors Springrove’s original dishonesty about his cousin Adelaide. Manston’s effeminacy, which is ostensibly reprobated in the novel, reflects the emasculation that both Owen and Springrove experience, but that they overcome by bolstering their class credentials through reasserting their patriarchal rights over Cytherea. Yet when Manston attempts something very similar he must be destroyed. Each man treats the heroine as a pawn in the power game that reinforces his own sense of male bourgeois selfhood, so that while it may be accurate enough to call Æneus Manston narcissistic, he is not really that different from the men who supplant him. Owen Graye and Edward Springrove also manipulate Cytherea for their own purposes, and while they may not be as onanistic as he, their self-involvement is manifest throughout the story. Desperate Remedies uses the conventions of melodrama and sensation fiction to demonstrate the ways in which Victorian masculine power depends for its creation on controlling both the feminine and the female, and also to reveal how vulnerable such masculinity is during periods of cultural transition. Jonathan Loesberg argues that sensation novels evoke “a world made chaotic and at least partially indecipherable by the loss of class identity,”46 and although Hardy’s text manages in the end to restore middle-class order, its protagonists have been pushed to the very edge of social dissolution. His exploration of the precarious and yet oppressive nature of masculinity is masked by the convolutions of the plot even as the resolution of that plot exposes it. The text’s ending, which aligns the proper hero with the proper heroine, and which sees them firmly established as the new inhabitants of Knapwater House with a “settlement . . . whereby their children, heirs, and cetrer, be to inherit” the estate (DR 380), is unsettling because it forces the reader to recognize the cost of achieving this union of property and propriety. The novel reveals, as Brady succinctly puts it, women’s “powerless position in the sexual economy,”47 an observation that nicely unifies the issues of gender roles and financial status that drive its plot, while Jane Thomas is even more aggressive in her evaluation of the heroine’s commodification: “Few more ludicrous yet pertinent examples of woman’s subjection to patriarchal discourse can compare with Cytherea’s successive appropriation in the closing stages of the novel by would-be seducer, lover, and finally husband, like a valuable piece of hand-luggage.”48 Working within the melodramatic mode allows Hardy to provide a materialist examination of his society while avoiding “ ‘nail[ing] his colours to the mast’ so definitely in a first book,”49 another, perhaps more comprehensible
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recommendation provided to him by Meredith, since the complicated plotting acts as a kind of cover for the book’s darker implications. When next Hardy approached these topics, however, he had no further need of either advice or dissimulation, and the result was the ambitious experiment in character exploration, genre mixing, and class critique that produced The Mayor of Casterbridge.
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“ ‘No man ever loved another as I did thee’ ”: Melodrama, Masculinity, and the Moral Occult (I) in The Mayor of Casterbridge
T
he Mayor of Casterbridge is often seen as initiating the “major phase” of Hardy’s fiction-writing career, since following its publication in 1886 appeared The Woodlanders (1887), Wessex Tales (1888), Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891), and Jude the Obscure (1895).1 The idea, therefore, that it “was only with The Mayor of Casterbridge that he regained, through what was not an entirely conscious choice of story setting, and treatment, those levels of achievement at which he had more spontaneously arrived in the finest of his early novels,”2 gives the text a significant prominence in his canon. As well, Hardy’s manifest intent to link his protagonist, Michael Henchard, with Oedipus and Lear3 implies that he was aiming for the high tragic effects associated with Sophocles and Shakespeare. Such constructions of the novel leave little room within conventional criticism for explorations of its employment of the sensational and the melodramatic, since these kinds of “low” genres are usually thought of as detrimental to the successful creation of tragedy. Marjorie Garson says of The Mayor of Casterbridge that “[t]here is little of the melodrama which for some readers mars Far from the Madding Crowd and Tess of the d’Urbervilles; few of the purple patches . . . which evoke a questionable kind of pathos,”4 while Philip Allingham, after a careful evaluation of sensation novel elements in the text, asserts that “the novelist did pander to [the] general taste for suspense, melodrama, and extremes of behavior in both serial and volume
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forms.”5 Leaving aside the contradiction in analytical position of these two statements, what they share is an obvious distaste for a type of writing that, implicitly or explicitly, is seen as disfiguring Hardy’s style in a “serious” work, with Allingham concluding his argument by declaring that “[e]arly in his career as a writer, Hardy fell under the spell of the Sensation Novel,” but nonetheless in this case he produced “not Sensation but Art.”6 As I have suggested, however, neither Hardy nor a significant portion of his Victorian audience felt the need to separate melodrama, sensationalism, and art in quite this rigid a manner. Indeed, the “spell” of the sensation novel may be in place even within Hardy’s own oeuvre, since scenes from Desperate Remedies find themselves echoed in The Mayor of Casterbridge. That in which Cytherea turns, expecting to see her brother, Owen, behind her on the Lewborne Bay excursion ship, only to discover that it is Edward Springrove instead, finds expression again when Lucetta, preparing to meet her former lover the Mayor, and having compulsively hidden herself behind a window curtain in “a freak of timidity,”7 flings it back “with a nervous greeting” (MC 146) only to see Donald Farfrae, not Henchard, standing before her. The rivalry between Owen and Edward for Cytherea must be presented indirectly, given the incest subtext already discussed, while the rivalry between Henchard and Farfrae over Lucetta quickly becomes explicit, so that on one level the later narrative might seem more conventional. But the relationship between the two main male characters in The Mayor of Casterbridge demonstrates a shared sensationalism with Hardy’s first published novel. The climactic wrestling match between Henchard and Farfrae is a reiteration of the final physical struggle between Springrove and Manston, yet the homosocial desire hinted at in Henchard’s feelings for his former employee complicates what otherwise might seem just another expression of male competition for dominance. This exploration of same-sex attraction creates another link between the two texts, although just as with the representation of Miss Aldclyffe in Desperate Remedies there is considerable critical disagreement over what Hardy achieves by “queering” his tragic protagonist. Finally, the powerful conclusion of Henchard’s story, presented in the “Will,” which both lays out his last requests/demands and also symbolizes his self-willed death, is a compressed version of Manston’s “Last Words,” which provide the final comments on his own, more straightforward suicide. The obvious difference between the two documents is that, from an authorial point of view, the main purpose of Manston’s note is to clarify various elements of the mystery plot, while Henchard’s is to provide one last expression of his character, but each also serves a similar role in generating the ambiguity that is important for both novels. Henchard as the error-prone hero and Manston as the quasi-sympathetic villain work to foster the complex audience responses crucial to both effective sensation
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fiction and effective tragedy, so that while there are obvious disparities between the two novels there are also similarities. Like Shakespeare’s sensationalism as described by Sala in his Belgravia article, Hardy’s integration of the sensational and the tragic in The Mayor of Casterbridge is not a weakness to be decried, but rather an important element of the novel’s continuing power. Connected to this blend of genres is a theatricality of presentation that provides the melodramatic structure to the narrative’s sensational events. John Goode is clearly correct when he observes that [a]ll Henchard’s decisive acts are theatrical and the story is constructed around them—the auction, the oath, the banquet, the meeting with Susan in the arena, the embrace of Farfrae, the visit to the soothsayer, the greeting of the royal personage, the reading out of Lucetta’s letters, his meeting with her in the arena, the fight with Farfrae, the last exit . . . This theatricality does not enter and transform the novel: it is the very condition of its existence.8
At the core of Henchard’s personality is an urge toward self-dramatization that, as the list above indicates, is often detrimental, if not actively destructive, to his survival within a Casterbridge society that, although he cannot perceive it, is evolving away from his type of personal enactment. And this, I would argue, provides the most direct connection between The Mayor of Casterbridge and Desperate Remedies. If the earlier novel explores the anxieties of middle-class masculinity as it struggles to find a stable construction within a newly bourgeois world, then the later one illustrates the moment of transition in which that new kind of masculine identity confronts and defeats an older version of maleness that is portrayed as tragically obsolete. Henchard represents what might be designated “melodramatic masculinity,” a form of male expression that is predicated on the “self-begotten, arranged, significant and egocentric gesture,”9 and whose performance insists on an assertive individuality that increasingly has no place in a culture beginning the movement toward mechanized uniformity and capitalist discipline. In contrast, Elizabeth-Jane and Farfrae come close to illustrating the precise opposite of the melodramatic mode, she in her controlled self-effacement and he in his shallow mutability, the way in which “[h]is many parts cancel each other out to a disconcerting blankness.”10 As for the two women who engage Henchard sexually, Susan is too self-repressed to dramatize her feelings, while Lucetta, although certainly willing to perform whatever role will best suit her interests, is as shallow as Farfrae without his adaptive abilities. This leaves Henchard, as Hardy intended, dominating the text, and the “tragic grandeur and drama of [his] story”11 would be considerably lessened without the melodramatic sensibility that is the foundation of this “Man of Character.”12
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THE MAYOR OF CASTERBRIDGE
MELODRAMAS OF MASCULINITY
While Henchard is an embodiment of melodramatic masculinity, his antithesis, Farfrae, symbolizes a new form of manhood predicated on detached calculation and professionalism. Although he projects a sentimentalism that makes him popular with both the “tradesmen” and the “inferior set” at the Three Mariners (MC 48) when he first arrives in Casterbridge, that persona is quickly replaced by a disciplined commitment to profitability and social status when it is no longer necessary. James Eli Adams makes clear what such a paradigm shift represents, and therefore clarifies the significance of Farfrae’s eventual victory over Henchard. Self-discipline is of course a fabled Victorian attribute, whose extraordinary prominence in nineteenth-century culture historians have explained as a function of the conjoint rise of Evangelicalism and an increasingly pervasive market economy . . . The passing of “the old ideal of Manhood,” in Carlyle’s phrase, points to the broadly European phenomenon . . . which is but one facet of the profound transformation of English culture in the wake of industrialism . . . What had intervened, notoriously, was a momentous transformation of economic possibility that incited increasingly complicated and anxious efforts to claim new forms of status and to construct new hierarchies of authority . . . In this context, the energetic self-discipline that distinguished manly “character” offered not only economic utility but also a claim to new forms of status and privilege within an increasingly secular and industrialized society.13
Since, as Hadley asserts, “[i]n the face of rapid industrialization, private capital accumulation, and bureaucratization, the melodramatic mode’s distinctive theatricality insisted on the continued vitality of traditionally public, social formations,”14 the employment of melodrama in The Mayor of Casterbridge has a much broader purpose than merely pandering to Hardy’s readership. The novel’s use of melodramatic excess in the evocation of its main character signifies Henchard’s opposition to the overwhelming economic forces that are about to penetrate the world he thinks he controls. Hillis Miller observes that “[w]hat the narrative voice describes is not so much a stable community . . . as a community in the midst of rapid and disruptive change . . . Casterbridge is . . . in rapid transition from being an oral culture to being one based on writing . . . [a] further confirmation of the transition from traditional to modern commercial and industrialized rural society.”15 Henchard’s association with that passing oral culture, the fact that he is “mentally and physically unfit for grubbing subtleties from soiled paper” (MC 72), associates him with the roots of melodrama, just as Farfrae’s “initiating himself into the managerial work of the house by overhauling the books” (MC 72) affiliates him with the document-based, bourgeois realism that will replace it. The novel’s melodrama provides
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not only a semiotic for understanding its main character, but also for the shifting materialist influences that encompass him. Although at various stages in the text Henchard is isolated from the Casterbridge community he for a time governs, he nonetheless also represents the type of manliness that depends upon a socially recognized, communal validity for its status. It is for this reason that he must respond publicly to the accusation of “growed wheat” (MC 30) when “the loungers outside” the bow-window of the King’s Arms call out “ ‘Hey! How about the bad bread, Mr. Mayor?’ ” (MC 35), and why it is so devastating when his “old-fashioned” (MC 96) public entertainment is completely outshone by Farfrae’s string-band and pavilion, notwithstanding the fact that the Scotsman, as a good businessman, has decided to “charge admission at the rate of so much a head” (MC 96). Despite Henchard’s reputation as “the celebrated abstaining worthy” (MC 34) at the beginning of the story, it is telling that the internalized self-discipline that raised him to his public position as Mayor occurs during the 19-year lacuna that separates the novel’s first two chapters from the rest of the narrative. We never actually see Henchard demonstrate the type of self-control that could potentially prepare him for the “new hierarchies of authority” invoked by Adams and associated with industrialized capitalism; we are only shown its collapse. The manner of expression of that control while it exists, however, is important. Because it is embodied through his oath that he “will avoid all strong liquors for the space of twenty-one years to come” (MC 18), and because that oath is motivated by the undisciplined, drunken selling of his wife and child, Hardy establishes a more specific template for his novel—that of temperance melodrama. Joanna Devereux has noted what she designates the “politics of temperance” in The Mayor of Casterbridge, asserting that through his oath Henchard “align[s] himself with that powerful nineteenth-century social movement known as teetotalism,”16 while Jane Lilienfield suggests “Hardy was most likely familiar with some of the numerous abstinence pledges on which Michael Henchard’s ‘gospel oath’ . . . is based.”17 Although it is certainly possible that Hardy knew something about the actual temperance movement, it is also possible that, as was the case with many Victorians, a good part of that knowledge came from popular dramatizations about the evils of drink that became a staple of the English stage after Douglas Jerrold’s Fifteen Years of a Drunkard’s Life opened at the Chatham Theatre in 1828. Louis James argues that “Jerrold’s impact on the early stages of melodrama was at least as great as that of Boucicault in the sixties,”18 so that the themes initiated by melodrama, centered on alcoholism and its effects, influenced the entire form, most specifically by exploring such interlocking issues as class tension, constructions of masculinity, and the dissolution of
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THE MAYOR OF CASTERBRIDGE
MELODRAMAS OF MASCULINITY
the family, all three of which are crucial to Hardy’s text. The key structural element of temperance melodrama for Hardy’s purposes, however, was the possibility it provided for modifying what in modern terms is often presented as standard melodrama’s greatest artistic weakness—its propensity for happy endings achieved through unrealistic poetic justice. While it is certainly true that by midcentury temperance dramas could conform to something very like this stereotype, with “the generic structure tak[ing] the shape of an inverted arc as the young family man . . . takes to drink and slides into complete moral and financial degradation before renouncing alcohol and fulfilling his destiny as he rises on the ladder of economic success and social prestige,”19 this was not always the case, since earlier, darker forms of the narrative were still available. Thus John W. Frick observes that while Jerrold subtitled Fifteen Years of a Drunkard’s Life “a melodrama,” in many respects the play violated, even undermined, the melodramatic formula . . . the conventional melodramatic conclusion in which rewards and punishments are meted out based upon moral merits and defects, is subverted, with good and evil alike perishing at the end much in the manner . . . of Jacobean tragedy. Lastly, in depicting alcohol as addictive . . . Jerrold clouds the issue of blame, thereby blurring the ethical polarity required by melodrama and introducing a grim determinism into his script.20
In this way melodramatic theatrical representations of alcohol abuse were available to be constructed as tragedies, a combining of forms that Hardy utilizes not only in The Mayor of Casterbridge but also, as we shall see, in Jude the Obscure. While neither novel is in itself a temperance melodrama, since they do not possess the sharply focused didactic purpose of such narratives, they do contain elements of this subgenre that help Hardy explore his own concerns. Certainly each could be described as possessing different types of “grim determinism,” although in Henchard’s case its source is not rum-laced furmity, but something much more complex. In a famous declaration the narrator invokes a prominent eighteenthcentury author when he observes “Character is Fate, said Novalis” (MC 107), and this statement has wide-ranging implications for the text. Both Dale Kramer and Simon Gatrell raise an important point, however, when they note that, rather than explicitly quoting Novalis, Hardy is here more probably alluding to George Eliot. Kramer makes the following argument: Hardy read little German, and it is almost certain that he obtained this quotation from George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss, ch. 6 of Book Sixth . . . “For the tragedy of our lives is not created entirely from within. ‘Character,’ says
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Novalis in one of his questionable aphorisms—‘character is destiny.’ But not the whole of our destiny” . . . It is possible that by so obviously paraphrasing Eliot’s well-known translation Hardy intends to draw into his novel the context Eliot provides (“one of his questionable aphorisms”), and thereby qualify the assertion made so directly in the novel. None the less, this assertion about the dominance of character bears authorial commitment, in opposition to the novel’s contrasting viewpoint . . . [Farfrae’s statement that] “it’s ourselves that are ruled by the powers above us.” In context Farfrae obviously is rationalizing his wish to stay in Casterbridge to be mayor despite Lucetta’s urging that he retire so they can live elsewhere.21
I would certainly agree that Farfrae’s appeal to “higher powers” is the kind of self-serving rationalization characteristic of him, but the novel does not necessarily endorse a binary reading that therefore assigns “authorial commitment” to the power of character. Because Henchard is part of an agricultural world whose methods of business and modes of production are, as a reflection of the society outside of Casterbridge, in a state of flux, he is enmeshed in a cultural evolution completely beyond his control. Certainly his “character” plays a large part in his inability to evolve in order to survive those shifts, but his “fate” might have been very different in altered circumstances, just as Maggie Tulliver’s would have been in The Mill on the Floss.22 As well, The Mayor of Casterbridge provides numerous examples of Hardyan coincidence, the kind of random chance that is also absolutely uninfluenced by character. The text is explicit about the contingency of experience when it introduces Farfrae into the plot, for after Henchard publicly declares that it is impossible to make good the bad wheat, we are told [Farfrae] might possibly have passed by without stopping at all, or at most for half a minute to glance in at the scene, had not his advent coincided with the discussion on corn and bread, in which event this history had never been enacted . . . When he heard Henchard’s closing words, “It can’t be done,” he smiled, impulsively drew out his pocket-book, and wrote down a few words by the aid of the light in the window. (MC 37)
This is a direct evocation of the “Crass Casualty” that unconsciously creates human suffering in Hardy’s poem “Hap,”23 for if Farfrae had passed a minute earlier or later, or if he had not acted “impulsively” to provide Henchard with his process for (partially) restoring corn, the entire tragedy “had never been enacted,” regardless of the Mayor’s temperament. Since the novel provides conflicting explanations about the influences that shape human destiny (character, materialist circumstances, chance), Gatrell is right to note the “radical ambiguity” that pervades it concerning this issue,
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and to assert that “since the narrative voice is fundamentally contradictory, not anyway a homogeneous thing, the reader is left free to choose one or all of these methods of accounting for the way things turn out.”24 The inability to establish a unified and coherent sense of meaning, the perception that experience is inevitably fragmented and often random, is at the heart of both Henchard’s often baffled efforts to come to terms with his world and Hardy’s employment of melodrama, for it is the personal/ethical/cultural dilemmas that result from this awareness that generates the novel’s tragic vision, and a useful way of understanding this is through Brooks’ concept of the moral occult. For Brooks “melodrama is a form for a post-sacred era, in which polarization and hyperdramatization of forces in conflict represent a need to locate and make evident, legible, and operative those large choices of ways of being which we hold to be of overwhelming importance even though we cannot derive them from any transcendental system of belief.”25 The ethical urge being dramatized is “occult” because in a context denuded of absolutist spiritual certainties it can only be expressed through material experience that necessarily obstructs and occludes nonmaterial values. The possibility of misinterpreting vice and virtue is therefore all but inescapable, and melodrama in its classic form functions by first of all constructing such a misreading and then correcting it through the eventual (inevitable) revelation and reward of good and the concomitant exposure and expulsion of evil. Gunning summarizes the idea of the moral occult as follows: Brooks revealed that the drama of melodrama lay . . . in signs. While the essential nature of vice and virtue might be unalterable and eternal in the world of melodrama, drama occurs as the villainous character cloaks himself in the signs of virtue and besmirches innocence with the appearance of vice. Melodrama reaches its climax less by the triumph of virtue than by “making the world morally legible” as truth shines through all repression . . . melodrama reveals itself as a play of signs, moving from their eclipse by the powers of evil to their final visibility and acknowledgement. Melodramas, rather than being plays of blood and thunder, sound and fury, are in fact dramas of significance . . . the construction of meaning . . . Although Brooks affirms melodrama’s essential relation to forms of excess, this excess is for him an excess of meaning, or expression, which must muster energy to break through the repression occasioned by a false play of signs.26
At first this might seem to contradict what is happening in The Mayor of Casterbridge, since the complexity of Henchard’s situation cannot be reconciled with a Manichean vision that establishes clear categories of
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innocence and villainy. However, that melodrama concerns itself with the constructedness of meaning, and that its excesses are meant to “break through the repression occasioned by the false play of signs,” has clear applicability to Hardy’s novel. At its most basic this is expressed through what Juliet Grindle describes as “the truly remarkable amount of lying which is done”27 within the narrative, and the series of secrets that result from it, an element that further aligns the novel with sensation fiction. Henchard is both a propagator and a victim of these lies and secrets, but as the text’s protagonist it will be he who causes their eventual collapse through the forceful excess of his own energy. Like Oedipus and Lear, he is forced to recognize truths by seeing through the false significations that surround him (false significations that he, also like Oedipus and Lear, has played a considerable role in constructing) and these truths are devastating because they destroy his assumptions about himself and his culture. Unlike them, however, he exists in a universe bereft of any divine principle that might redeem, or even mitigate, the suffering that results. Although there are moments when Henchard appears to accept the possibility of a deity, these are quickly rescinded. For example, after he is forestalled in his first attempt to commit suicide by the seemingly providential appearance of the skimmity-ride effigy in the water below him at Ten-Hatches Weir, an intervention that is followed by Elizabeth-Jane’s willingness to return and take care of him, he exclaims “ ‘Who is such a reprobate as I! And yet it seems that even I be in Somebody’s hand!’ ” (MC 278). This (qualified) declaration of faith concludes Chapter XLI, but the very first sentence of the next chapter informs us that “the emotional conviction that he was in Somebody’s hand began to die out of Henchard’s breast as time slowly removed into distance the event which had given that feeling birth” (MC 279). Hardy is simply unwilling to provide the potential support and solace of religious conviction, since he does not himself accept its availability, and Henchard is left on his own to achieve whatever ethical insights may be derived as “a particular moment of dramatic intensity and significance transforms action into an instance of meaning.”28 The Mayor of Casterbridge is not structured to make evident the moral occult—its main character is living the moral occult. Further, Brooks’ elaboration of the focus such a discourse creates fits precisely Hardy’s use of the melodramatic mode in this novel, even if he is not fulfilling melodrama’s explicit dramatic purpose. Brooks observes that, by the end of the Enlightenment, there was clearly a renewed thirst for the Sacred, a reaction to desacrilization . . . The reaction both reasserted the need for some version of the Sacred and offered further proof of the irremediable loss of the Sacred in its traditional, categorical, unifying form. Mythmaking
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could now only be individual, personal; and the promulgation of ethical imperatives had to depend on an individual act of self-understanding that would then—by an imaginative or even a terroristic leap—be offered as the foundation of a general ethics. In fact, the entity making the strongest claim to sacred status tends more and more to be personality itself. From amid the collapse of other principles and criteria, the individual ego declares its central and overriding value, its demand to be the measure of all things . . . Melodrama represents both the urge toward resacralization and the impossibility of conceiving sacralization other than in personal terms.29
As a “man of character,” a man whose personality and ego drive him in ways that he cannot fully control, Henchard embodies the potential for a type of awareness that lifts him beyond societal conventions, but that nonetheless remains fully and inescapably grounded in the material. The self-knowledge he achieves is therefore quintessentially melodramatic, in Brooks’ terms, in that it is not transferable through an appeal to some externalized, objective, sacralized truth, but only by a subjective act of imaginative sympathy. An illustration of how this works occurs with Henchard’s discovery of the crucial secret held back from him by Susan— that the Elizabeth-Jane who traveled with her to Casterbridge is not his daughter, but Newson’s. After the scene in which Henchard reveals to Elizabeth-Jane part of what, ironically, he believes to be his secret, by claiming to be her father, the narrator describes his motive for immediately seeking out documents that will confirm their relationship: “He was the kind of man to whom some human object for pouring out his heat upon—were it emotive or were it choleric—was almost a necessity. The craving of his heart for the re-establishment of this tenderest human tie had been great during his wife’s lifetime, and now he had submitted to its mastery without reluctance and without fear” (MC 116). This evocation of Henchard’s character is precise in its portrayal of his intemperate emotional needs, even as it limits his personality’s determinative influence, since the fulfillment of those needs is only “almost a necessity.” Nonetheless, the distinctive, melodramatic excess of his reactions, the “blaze of satisfaction that he always emitted when he had carried his point” (MC 116), is also what drives the moment of self-recognition that occurs after he reads Susan’s letter confessing her deception. Her husband regarded the paper—as if it were a window pane through which he saw for miles. His lip twitched, and he seemed to compress his frame, as if to bear better. His usual habit was not to consider whether destiny were hard upon him or not—the shape of his ideas in cases of affliction being simply a moody “I am to suffer I perceive,”—“This much scourging, then, is it, for
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The imagery showing Henchard’s widened vision marks the start of his accepting responsibility for the past that now begins to close around him. Then, when he thinks to wonder whether Susan’s assertion about her daughter’s paternity might itself be untrue, he enters the sleeping Elizabeth-Jane’s bedroom to “read” her face, and we are told that “[h]e steadfastly regarded her features . . . [i]n sleep there come to the surface buried genealogical facts, ancestral curves, dead men’s traits, which the mobility of daytime animation screens and overwhelms. In the present statuesque repose of the young girl’s countenance Richard Newson’s was unmistakably reflected” (MC 118). Here Henchard literally breaks through a false play of signs into real meaning, and although his progress in this direction will be far from linear, with many instances of self-indulgence and willful prevarication still to come, the remorseless process cannot be stopped. H. M. Daleski, who like Grindle notes that in The Mayor of Casterbridge “[d]eception . . . is a recurrent motif . . . as characters deceive one another with abandon,” also observes of Henchard that “[i]t is not only that he resorts often to deception . . . and that he is the cause of deception by others; primarily, and essentially, he is given to self-deception,”30 and it is the slow erosion of this self-deception, the grim, gradual acceptance of the need to see himself for the man he actually is, that gives Henchard’s story the full dimensions of tragedy. Despite his numerous errors and failings the reader is brought into a sympathetic alignment with Henchard as he pierces the most difficult of all moral occults, the occlusion of one’s own character, and is made to suffer for the essential but painful ethical insights produced. Hardy’s employment of the melodramatic mode and the series of sensational events that drive it are therefore crucial in delineating his tragic protagonist, and necessary in order for him to achieve both his aesthetic purpose and the audience engagement without which that purpose could not be realized. Not all critics would accept this evaluation, however. Michael Valdez Moses, in an article invoking earlier evaluations of the novel with which he agrees, claims that [a]s Norman Friedman and Irving Howe have argued, one consequence of Hardy’s narrative excess is a disjunction in his plot. The Mayor of Casterbridge contains in fact two superimposed but separate plot lines, one involving Henchard, Susan, Elizabeth-Jane, and Newson, the other involving Henchard, Farfrae, and Lucetta. These two plot lines only appear to converge: one domestic and personal, brought about in large part by the furmity
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me.” But now through his passionate head there stormed this thought—that the blasting disclosure was what he had deserved. (MC 117)
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woman’s revelation of Henchard’s past, the other economic and political, the result of Henchard’s commercial war with Farfrae . . . There are of course many ways in which these two plot lines may be thematically related . . . But though the novel possesses thematic unity, it lacks structural integrity, and to some degree this structural defect, once recognised, diminishes the tragic effect of the novel as a whole. The novel does not possess the unity of action and tight dramatic logic characteristic of Sophoclean and Shakespearean tragedy.31
This idea that there is “too much” plotting in the text to create an effective tragedy provides yet another connection to Desperate Remedies, because it was criticized for the same “flaw,” although since it aspired only to be a sensation novel the stakes in its case are usually presented as considerably lower. As far as The Mayor of Casterbridge is concerned, however, there does seem to be some authorial warrant for such a critique. In a comment that is often reproduced in discussions of this novel the Life has this to say: It was a story which Hardy fancied he had damaged more recklessly as an artistic whole, in the interest of the newspaper in which it appeared serially, than perhaps any other of his novels, his aiming to get an incident into almost every week’s part causing him in his own judgment to add events to the narrative somewhat too freely. However as at this time he called his novel-writing “mere journeywork,” he cared little about it as art, though it must be said in favour of the plot, as he admitted later, that it was quite coherent and organic, in spite of its complication.32
The last sentence here, in which Hardy insists that he in fact did not believe his plot was seriously harmed by the amount of incident it provides, is usually left out (as it is by Moses) by those who wish to suggest that he regretted his narrative structure, and Kramer perceptively notes that this passage “shows how contorted Hardy’s syntax becomes when he refers to his indifference to fiction, as if he were torn by equally strong urges to affirm and to deny the dedication he had given to his writing decades before he came to write his autobiography.”33 Further, Moses’ assertion that “[t]o overload a tragic novel with too many calamities is to risk producing bathos and an unintended farcical effect, for it taxes the reader’s credibility and powers of empathy”34 is directly contradicted by Hardy’s declaration that “after all it is not improbabilities of incident but improbabilities of character that matter,”35 and Henchard’s character is fully integrated into the text’s melodramatic mode. Indeed, it might be possible to argue that the calamities visited upon Lear achieve something very close to overload without seriously weakening the dramatic logic of Shakespeare’s play, so that Hardy’s method does not differ greatly from at least one of his models.
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However, an even more powerful argument against the supposedly weakened structure created by the novel’s two plot strands is available in its representation of masculinity. Although this is obviously a thematic element of Hardy’s narrative, it serves a wider purpose as well. Howe’s specific suggestion is that “we see that Hardy is weaving together an entanglement between the personal and public sides of Henchard’s experience,” but there is “no necessary or sufficiently coercive reason why the consequences of a personal sin should coincide in time and impact with the climax of a socio-economic failure.”36 Ironically Howe’s notorious opening to his discussion of The Mayor of Casterbridge, which claims that “to shake loose from one’s wife, to discard that drooping rag of a woman . . . not by a slinking abandonment but through the public sale of her body to a stranger, as horses are sold at a fair; and thus to wrest, through sheer amoral willfulness, a second chance out of life” is “insidiously attractive to male fantasy,”37 touches upon, without recognizing, the structural tie that unites Henchard’s peripeteia. It is the destruction of his sense of successful maleness, and the forced necessity to reevaluate his identity that it entails, that leaves him vulnerable to both the people and the events that overwhelm him. Yet this loss also provides him (and the reader) with the opportunity for increased awareness, the anagnorisis that is necessary in a tragedy. Masculinity, which as a culturally constructed but fluctuating norm is on one hand extremely public, is on the other hand intensely personal, since internalized social expectations about what is properly masculine and feminine significantly shape perceptions of self. Gender thus collapses the private/public, internal/external binaries that ostensibly divide the Henchard/Elizabeth-Jane/Susan plotline from the Henchard/Lucetta/Farfrae plotline, since Henchard’s personal conflicts involving his wife and putative daughter strike at the same core of personality that the social status and business conflicts involving his competition with Farfrae do. Like Owen Graye through his manipulation of Cytherea in Desperate Remedies, Henchard attempts to shore up his increasingly fragile masculine sense of self through the control of women who are “his” (his daughter, his former mistress), but as in the earlier novel what this actually reveals is his personal and social vulnerability. Hardy’s exploration of masculinity makes it all but impossible to disentangle private from public, and it is this that creates narrative coherence out of an apparently disjunctive structure. Because Henchard’s melodramatic masculinity requires for its demonstration the kind of dramatic gestures that punctuate the text, Judith Butler’s theories of gender are especially applicable, in particular her argument that “[t]here is no gender identity behind the expressions of gender; that identity is performatively constituted by the very ‘expressions’ that are
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said to be its results.”38 The novel’s protagonist acts out a version of manliness that has served him well for most of his life, only to discover that the performance no longer suits the cultural theater in which he finds himself, whether he is staging it in his own home, in the more revealing proscenium of the banquet room of the King’s Arms, or in the fully exposed arena of the marketplace, which the narrator specifically describes as “like the regulation Open Place in spectacular dramas” (MC 155). This is especially well illustrated by the novel’s famous opening scenes, although perhaps not in the way Howe implies. It is important to recognize that Henchard is performing a certain type of masculinity well before the wife sale, so that that event becomes the culminating indication of his version of manliness, not the determinative one. As he and Susan walk toward Casterbridge, Henchard ostentatiously ignores his wife and small daughter by “reading, or pretending to read, a ballad-sheet which he kept before his eyes with some difficulty” so that “the woman enjoyed no society whatever from his presence. Virtually she walked the highway alone” (MC 5). His refusal to acknowledge any link to the feminine, as doubly exemplified by ignoring his girl child as well as his wife, is a standard way to construct the male through contempt for, and denial of, the female. This is partly what Elaine Showalter recognizes when, in her influential article “The Unmanning of The Mayor of Casterbridge,” she argues “Henchard commits his life entirely to the male community, defining his human relationships by the male codes of money, paternity, honour and legal contract.”39 Although I do not fully agree with all of Showalter’s conclusions, her perception of the way Henchard attempts to enact his character is certainly accurate, and what makes it most interesting in this first portrayal is that he is playing the role essentially to himself. Although both the narrator and, through him, the reader are “observing” Henchard, as far as the character is concerned he and his small family are alone on the road. No doubt Henchard intends to communicate to Susan the “stale familiarity” (MC 6) he feels for her, but he is also rehearsing himself into the identity he wishes to inhabit: the manly man who, although attached to women, is not constrained by them. The text implies the constructedness of gender from its first paragraphs, as the description of Henchard “reading, or seeming to read” his ballad specifically implies a calculated effort to generate a masculine persona of indifference. This posturing, unsurprisingly, is then intensified with the appearance of an actual audience, since Henchard must now convince not only himself but also the people around him that his “expressions” of masculinity, to use Butler’s word, are in fact the truth of his personality. Once the rum available in Mrs. Goodenough’s furmity tent takes its effect we are told that “[t]he conversation took a high turn, as it often
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does on such occasions. The ruin of good men by bad wives, and, more particularly the frustration of many a promising youth’s high aims and hopes . . . by an early and imprudent marriage, was the theme” (MC 9), but that “conversation” is never reproduced. What occurs might more accurately be called a monologue, as Henchard, taking center stage, dominates the other customers with his claims that “ ‘I did for myself that way thoroughly . . . I married at eighteen, like the fool that I was; and this is the consequence o’t’ ” (MC 9), and that “ ‘I’d challenge England to beat me in the fodder business; and if I were a free man again I’d be worth a thousand pound before I’d done o’t’ ” (MC 10), culminating in his declaration “ ‘For my part I don’t see why men who have got wives, and don’t want ’em, shouldn’t get rid of ’em as these gipsy fellows do their old horses . . . Why, begad, I’d sell mine this minute, if anybody would buy her!’ ” (MC 10). It is only after this final extreme statement that other speakers are presented responding, and the two men who do so are willing to go along with his proposal, largely because both recognize Susan as attractive. Henchard’s public, melodramatic performance of maleness is validated, and he achieves his goal of asserting the kind of character he believes he has the right to become. It is an open question, however, whether he is actually prepared for the turn taken in the final act of this mixed piece of melodrama/psychodrama. The auction and sale that now ensue are manifestly meant to be sensational, and as Showalter notes, “there were many sensation novels of the 1870s and 1880s which presented the sale of women into marriage,”40 so that Hardy’s employment of this plot device merely intensifies literary precedents that are consistent with the sensationalism to follow. In the “Facts” notebook he records three separate instances of wife sales taken from the Dorset County Chronicle and, like Reade, he could therefore respond to accusations of unreality by appealing to multiple examples of documentary evidence. However, in revising the manuscript he chose to lessen the commonality of such events. After Henchard’s assertion in the novel’s printed form that “ ‘It has been done elsewhere—and why not here?’ ” (MC 13), two excised sentences in the manuscript continue “ ‘Why, Jimmy Clay, sold his wife, didn’t he, for thirty shillings? And wasn’t it done at Southampton the year before last?’ ”41 The removal of specifics renders Henchard’s act both more unique and more symbolic as, swept up into acting out a hypermasculinity that explicitly transforms women into “goods” (MC 11) to be disposed of through economic exchange, he publicly sheds the feminine hindrance that stands in the way of fully realized, melodramatic manliness. As the narrator observes, however, up until the moment Newson places his five pounds and five shillings onto the table, “it could not positively have been asserted that the man, in spite of his
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tantalizing declamation, was really in earnest” (MC 13), which shows that on some level the situation has spiraled out of Henchard’s control. But of course this means that now he must follow through on his proclaimed willingness to sell his family, since not to do so at this point would produce a public mockery destructive of the aggressive male role the entire exercise was intended to construct. Thus when Susan is led by Newson “out of the tent sobbing bitterly” (MC 14), even though a “stolid look of concern filled the husband’s face, as if, after all, he had not quite anticipated this ending” (MC 14), he must play his part to the end: “ ‘Mark me—I’ll not go after her!’ said the trusser, returning doggedly to his seat. ‘Let her go. If she’s up to such vagaries she must suffer for ’em’ ” (MC 15). And the novel then directly establishes the theatricality of what has just transpired. Outside the fair, in the valleys and woods, all was quiet. The sun had recently set, and the west heaven was hung with rosy cloud, which seemed permanent, yet slowly changed. To watch it was like looking at some grand feat of stagery from a darkened auditorium. In presence of this scene after the other there was a natural instinct to abjure man as the blot on an otherwise kindly universe; till it was remembered that all terrestrial conditions were intermittent, and that mankind might some night be innocently sleeping when these quiet objects were raging loud. (MC 14)
Hardy’s characteristic refusal to romanticize the natural world is joined to a foreshadowing that Henchard’s fortunes, like “all terrestrial conditions,” will be “intermittent,” but this passage’s specific evocation of the wife sale as a play scene also encourages the reader to consider the enacted qualities on display. The artificiality of gendered behavior, its reliance on role playing as much as any kind of inherent actuality, is implied from the start of the text, and thus it prepares for the anatomization of masculinity that follows. As already noted, the teetotal oath Henchard swears after he recovers from his drunkenness represents the establishment of a self-discipline that enables him, for a time, to match the ideology of manhood necessary for status mobility. While this might seem to contradict the exaggerated gestures that characterize his melodramatic version of manliness, the oath itself is just such a gesture, and although it is performed privately it stands as another example of Henchard rehearsing himself into a role he will pursue. Further, his abjuration of liquor hints at his abjuration of women, and as Daleski puts it, “[i]n this respect, his abstinence from drink in accordance with his vow may be regarded as concretizing a more radical abstention.”42 The arrival of Susan, Elizabeth-Jane, and Farfrae in Casterbridge on the same day, and indeed on the same spot in front of the
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King’s Arms, is in plot terms another of the novel’s coincidences, but there is nothing coincidental about it thematically. The return of the women who symbolize Henchard’s rejection of the feminine is specifically joined to the arrival of the man who, given different circumstances, might have provided the homosocial outlet necessary for him to finally escape the threatening female influences of his past. That this escape is presented as impossible demonstrates both that such evasions cannot succeed and that masculinities constructed in this way are extremely vulnerable. Henchard’s wish to establish an intense friendship with Farfrae is fully understandable within the context of nineteenth-century patriarchal culture since, as Sedgwick observes, “it is crucial to every aspect of social structure . . . that heavily freighted bonds between men exist, as the backbone of social form or forms.”43 As other critics have pointed out, however, Hardy suggests that there is more involved than just the desire to cultivate a protégé. After Farfrae originally turns down Henchard’s offer to take him into his business, the Mayor thinks to himself “ ‘to be sure, how that fellow does draw me . . . I suppose ’tis because I’m so lonely’ ” (MC 54). In the “proposal” scene that follows, which on a primary textual level presents the business offer that finally wins Farfrae over, but which subtextally hints at a different application of the word, Henchard, “holding the young man’s hand” (MC 60), delivers the following speech. “Once more, will ye stay? There it is, flat and plain. You can see that it isn’t all selfishness that makes me press ’ee; for my business is not quite so scientific as to require an intellect entirely out of the common. Others would do for the place without doubt. Some selfishness perhaps there is, but there is more; it isn’t for me to repeat what. Come, bide with me—and name your own terms. I’ll agree to ’em willingly and ’ithout a word of gainsaying; for, hang it, Farfrae, I like thee well!” (MC 61)
The echoes of courtship in this passage are clear, and Henchard’s refusal to “repeat” what “more” there is behind his pursuit of Farfrae seems to invoke an emotion that dare not speak its name. Farfrae’s response, delivered with “[h]is faced flushed,” is to exclaim “ ‘I never expected this—I did not!’ ”(MC 61), which positions him as the surprised (and feminized) recipient of a suitor’s sudden advances. His subsequent agreement to “stay and be [Henchard’s] man” is, we are told, greeted with “a satisfaction that was almost fierce in its strength,” culminating in the Mayor’s declaration that “ ‘I am the most distant fellow in the world when I don’t care for a man . . . But when a man takes my fancy he takes it strong’ ” (MC 61). That an element of what Sedgwick calls homosocial desire is at play here is undeniable, and to the extent that Henchard allows it to
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THE MAYOR OF CASTERBRIDGE
MELODRAMAS OF MASCULINITY
find expression he is channeling his feelings toward an outlet that, he assumes, will endorse and support his masculinity rather than (as women would) subverting it. His longing takes the form of confessing both the wife sale and his entanglement with Lucetta to his new friend because, “ ‘being by nature something of a woman-hater’ ” (MC 74), Henchard is “ ‘a lonely man . . . [with] nobody else to speak to’ ” (MC 73), and Farfrae acts as a (Henchard hopes) safely subordinate substitute for the threatening feminine presence he has attempted to evade. The question of whether Henchard “is” homosexual, however, is not the main issue, any more than the question of Miss Aldclyffe’s sexual orientation is the main issue in Desperate Remedies. What Hardy explores in both texts has much more to do with the way gender constructions are involved with self-identity and power, so that I think Kramer is right when he argues that “[t]o turn Henchard into a latent homosexual whose downfall stems from an inability to maintain the latency . . . does not help us to understand either the formal or the emotional qualities of the novel.”44 Instead it is more useful to consider how, as his exaggerated performance of melodramatic masculinity begins to fail after coming into contact with the now-inescapable feminine influences from his past, and with what might be called the “managerial” masculinity of Farfrae, Henchard is forced into a mixed role that problematizes binary sexual identity. It is not so much that he is “unmanned,” as Showalter would have it, but rather that the distinctions upon which this type of assigned quality is based are themselves subverted. The external, materialist causes of this process remain crucial, but, as often occurs in Hardy, the ramifications are also internal. It is for this reason that Henchard’s first conflict with Farfrae, over his treatment of Abel Whittle, marks an important shift in the text. Henchard’s very public chastisement of Whittle’s recurrent tardiness, by forcing him to travel to work without giving him time to dress fully, is completely consistent with the performed masculinity that defines him, but it cannot be reconciled with the type of professionalized restraint that characterizes Farfrae. Henchard’s intended humiliation of his workman contains an obvious element of phallic domination, as Whittle himself recognizes: “Yes—I’ll go to Blackmoor Vale half-naked as I be, since he do command it; but I shall kill myself afterwards; I can’t outlive the disgrace; for the womenfolk will be looking out of their winders at my mortification all the way along, and laughing me to scorn as a man ’ithout breeches! . . . Yes—I shall do myself harm—I feel it coming on!” (MC 93)
Although the exaggeration of this declaration renders it comic, with Whittle imagining women staring at his exposed “mortification,” the
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sensational scene Henchard has scripted is meant to demonstrate the strength of his own masculine self-assertion by dramatically imposing it on another man. When Farfrae intercedes, by announcing “ ‘I don’t care what Mr. Henchard said, nor anybody else! ’Tis simple foolishness to do this. Go and dress yourself instantly, Whittle’ ” (MC 93), he is thus directly opposing his version of masculinity against Henchard’s, something that is made clear when, after Henchard insists that Whittle continue half-dressed, Farfrae delivers an ultimatum: “ ‘Not if I am manager . . . He either goes home, or I march out of this yard for good’ ” (MC 93). By asserting his position as “manager,” and by threatening their professional relationship rather than invoking their friendship, Farfrae established the grounds upon which their association will rest while also demonstrating whose masculinity is in fact dominant. Henchard, attempting to return their connection to the personal, accuses Farfrae of being willing to publicly confront him because “ ‘I’ve told ye the secret o’ my life—fool that I was to do’t—and you take advantage of me,’ ” only to elicit Farfrae’s devastatingly revealing response, “ ‘I had forgot it’ ” (MC 94). For Farfrae properly and efficiently administered business is what matters, and it is this quality that puts him in tune with the cultural forces that are preparing to sweep the Mayor aside, for as the narrator observes, “Henchard, who had hitherto been the most admired man in his circle, was the most admired no longer” (MC 94). But Henchard, unable to comprehend a form of maleness so alien to him, continues to mistake what he has to fear, for “whenever he thought of Farfrae it was with a dim dread; and he often regretted that he had told the young man his whole heart, and confided to him the secrets of his life” (MC 95). Henchard’s poignant inability to realize that the personal vulnerability he feels plays no part in Farfrae’s calculations, and that “the young man” has no especial interest in “his whole heart” at all, marks the beginning of his “dim dread” of inadequacy, and of the reader’s sympathy for him. The two scenes that bring this conflict of masculinities to its climax are both sensational, but the first is public and therefore provides a social spectacle, while the second is private and focuses on a moment of intense individual experience. After he loses not only his post as Mayor, through Mrs. Goodenough’s revelation of the wife sale, but also his corn business and Lucetta to Farfrae, Henchard’s personal and social failures are exposed in a way that is intolerable to someone who has depended so completely on public performance to establish manly identity and self-worth. The visit of the “royal personage” (MC 243) to Casterbridge gives him an opportunity to place himself once more center stage, and to reestablish the role(s) he has lost.45 This prospect becomes especially important when Farfrae, acting as the voice of the town council, denies him the opportunity to be part of the official greeting party, since by ignoring this exclusion Henchard sets up a
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THE MAYOR OF CASTERBRIDGE
MELODRAMAS OF MASCULINITY
confrontation with his rival that will force Farfrae to acknowledge that their previous relationship cannot simply be ignored and forgotten. As well, Henchard specifically associates his planned intrusion into the ceremony with the conclusion of his teetotaler oath, declaring to Elizabeth-Jane, after having “primed himself in the morning with a glass of rum” that “ ‘[i]t was lucky . . . my twenty-one years had expired before this came on, or I should never have had the nerve to carry it out’ ” (MC 245). His refusal to allow Elizabeth-Jane to accompany him, the fact that he is drunk on rum, and his evocation of events 21 years ago suggest an attempt to reproduce the aggressive patriarchal stance that, enacted successfully in the Weydon Priors furmity tent, gave him the “nerve” to auction away his family and begin his rise to success. Kramer recognizes this structural parallel when he notes that the “royal visit is clearly part of the cyclic pattern, contributing to Henchard’s tragic course,”46 but the time for such melodramatic masculinity is long past, and instead of a triumphant reassertion of self Henchard is, as he himself recognizes, “disgraced” (MC 252). Certainly he manages to create the sensation he planned, for as he staggers up to the carriage window of the “illustrious personage,” and holds out his hand to be shaken, “[a]ll the ladies said with bated breath, ‘Oh, look there!’ and Lucetta was ready to faint. Elizabeth-Jane peeped through the shoulders of those in front, saw what it was, and was terrified; and then her interest in the spectacle as a strange phenomenon got the better of her fear” (MC 246). Henchard’s spectacular provocation ends when “Farfrae with mayoral authority . . . seized Henchard by the shoulder, dragged him back, and told him roughly to be off ” (MC 246), so that all he has confirmed is his repudiation by his former friend, a repudiation with strong tones of emasculation in that it takes place before a startled and judgmental female audience. This time it is Henchard’s “mortification” on display for the “women-folk,” and once again it is clear whose masculinity triumphs. Yet just as interesting, because less predictable, is Henchard’s response to this (literal and symbolic) manhandling. Instead of fighting back, and despite the “fierce light” (MC 246) in his eyes, “Henchard stood his ground rigidly; then by an unaccountable impulse gave way and retired” (MC 247). Devereux observes that Henchard is “[m]uch more stung by Farfrae’s rejection than Lucetta’s,”47 and it is this that causes his lack of resistance. That the narrator terms his response “unaccountable”—that is, not only apparently inexplicable but also unavailable for narrative description—is important for understanding how Henchard’s tragedy is presented, especially as the novel now begins to draw toward a close. Since he has always depended on enacting his character instead of explaining himself, Hardy presents his protagonist as simply unable to declare directly the slowly developing awarenesses that mark his changing perception of self and
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society; nor is in-depth narratorial access to the character provided. Instead Henchard’s evolution is performed in moments of public exposure and private anguish that demonstrate, as Robert E. Lougy puts it, that “the body is a theatre in which our desires are acted out, a text on which are transcribed narrative histories repressed by language.”48 This method, which relies on the broad melodramatic gesture and the loaded moment, such as Henchard turning away in silence from the man he has desired but who has just humiliated him, encourages positive reader response through emotional engagement rather than intellectual analysis, so that even in scenes where Henchard seems unsympathetic the tendency is to identify with the extremity of his situations and responses. What Henchard has just learned about himself, about Farfrae, and about his place in an increasingly modern culture is left unsaid, but the implications are clear enough without words. And this use of the melodramatic mode becomes even more effective in the sensation scene that follows, when Henchard sets out to murder Farfrae. The wrestling match that Henchard forces upon the younger man, in which the loser will be thrown from a loft “forty foot above ground” (MC 253), is a combat obviously intended to establish dominant masculinity in the most primal way possible. And as he makes a final attempt to circumvent the technological, economic, and social forces that have established Farfrae’s ascendancy, Henchard enacts one last time his own idealized form of manhood. His decision to tie one of his arms to his side in order to make the fight fairer is a performance of honorable manliness that is clearly important to his own sense of self-identity, as well as a display of scrupulousness meant to impress Farfrae even as he moves to attack him. The description of the fight that follows is sensational in that the reader is swept into a life-and-death struggle, but its ending, with Farfrae dangling half out of the loft door, concentrates on the emotional impact his “victory” has on Henchard. Farfrae responds to Henchard’s declaration that he has Farfrae’s “ ‘life . . . in [his] hands’ ” by saying “ ‘Then take it, take it! . . . Ye’ve wished to long enough!’ ” (MC 254), which leads to the following reaction. Henchard looked down upon him in silence, and their eyes met. “O, Farfrae—that’s not true!” he said bitterly. “God is my witness that no man ever loved another as I did thee at one time . . . And now—though I came here to kill ’ee, I cannot hurt thee! Go and give me in charge—do what you will—I care nothing for what comes of me!” He withdrew to the back part of the loft, loosened his arm, and flung himself into a corner upon some sacks, in the abandonment of remorse . . . Henchard took his full measure of shame and self-reproach.
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This episode has assumed increasing critical importance, with Showalter stating that it demonstrates the moment when “Henchard . . . finally cross[es] over psychically and strategically to the long-repressed ‘feminine’ side of himself,” and that his “surrender opens him for the first time to an understanding of human need measured in terms of feeling rather than property.”49 Devereux, in a considerably less positive reading, asserts that the “important word in this passage is ‘tragically.’ Henchard’s loss of manhood is meant to be taken as a tragedy, not as a sign of renewal or rebirth into a new identity . . . The shattering of Henchard’s manhood implies the destruction of his self. He may have ‘crossed over’ to his feminine side, as Showalter argues, but the transition only suggests a profound loss of power and control, not any hope for future regeneration.”50 Dalziel, attempting to negotiate a middle path, observes that although these “images of emasculation hardly constitute a celebration of Henchard’s newly awakened ‘femininity’ [his] journey towards love is unquestionably represented as positive,” so that the renewed relationship with Elizabeth-Jane that follows this intense moment of self-introspection demonstrates that it is “only when [Henchard] abandons his emasculated role and acts out of a strong, selfless love that the pathos of his story is transformed into tragedy.”51 The part Elizabeth-Jane plays in the novel’s rhetoric of character is significant, and needs to be returned to, but for now I would argue that polarized readings that see Henchard’s response as either a positive movement into full-fledged femininity, a complete destruction of his masculinity, or even a movement toward feminized acceptance of love employ gender binaries that the text undercuts. What is destroyed, or at least irrevocably subverted, is the rigid, hypermasculine role that Henchard has been enacting since the opening pages of the book, and although he may have attempted to convince himself that this was his “true” personality, the text’s emphasis on the performativity of his melodramatic manliness illustrates that it is not as foundational as he, or Hardy’s audience, might think. In The History of Sexuality: An Introduction Foucault argues that [i]t is through sex—in fact, an imaginary point determined by the deployment of sexuality—that each individual has to pass in order to have access to his own intelligibility (seeing that it is both the hidden aspect and the
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The scenes of his first acquaintance with Farfrae rushed back upon him— that time when the curious mixture of romance and thrift in the young man’s composition so commanded his heart that Farfrae could play upon him as on an instrument. So thoroughly subdued was he that he remained on the sacks in a crouching attitude, unusual for a man, and for such a man. Its womanliness sat tragically on the figure of so stern a piece of virility. (MC 254–255)
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What Hardy illustrates at this crucial moment might be described as Henchard’s crisis of intelligibility, a traumatic recognition that the masculine identity he has formulated for himself over the last 21 years is both artificial and inadequate. His declaration of love for Farfrae is matched in intensity nowhere else in the text, and the memory of how Farfrae could “[command] his heart” and “play upon him as on an instrument” carries a clear erotic charge. Such an explicit confession of homosocial desire manifestly represents, in Foucault’s words, both a “hidden aspect” and a “generative principle of meaning” that radically alters (but not necessarily destroys) Henchard’s conscious sense of self. Further, Hardy’s curious spatial metaphor is striking. The idea that Henchard’s “womanliness” sits “on” his masculine virility creates an image of overlaid gender qualities that does not imply erasure, but rather the possibility of an amalgamation if they can be integrated. It is significant that the narrator does not identify Henchard’s situation here as a tragedy, but instead employs the adjective “tragically,” thus moving the description into the realm of subjectivity and interpretation. The remainder of the text will illustrate its protagonist’s ultimately failed effort to construct for himself a space in which he can enact a gender integration that is “[i]n opposition to [the] false construction of ‘sex’ as both univocal and causal.”53 As is so often the case in Hardy, however, Henchard’s tragedy resides not in his new awareness and its influence on him, but rather in the fact that his awareness arrives too late to be employed successfully, both in cultural and in personal terms. Farfrae’s ascendant managerial masculinity, with its emphasis on discipline and control, is in its own way as restrictive of gender flexibility as the hypermasculinity it replaces, so that there is no place for whatever type of hybridity Henchard may manage to construct. And with Newson’s return, threatening as it does the loss of Elizabeth-Jane and therefore the loss of the familial theater that is the only one in which Henchard any longer cares to perform, his past actions ruthlessly impose themselves on his changed character. Before this threat finds full expression, however, Hardy signals Henchard’s shift in masculinity through yet another sensational event: the skimmity-ride. Funded by Newson himself, who tells the denizens of Peter’s Finger that he “should not mind seeing the performance” (MC 241), his contribution of a sovereign sets in motion what Goode calls “the major theatrical event”54 of the novel. At the center of this “ ‘old foolish thing they do in these parts, when a man’s wife is—well, not too particularly his own’ ” (MC 241) are the two stuffed figures of Henchard and Lucetta “ ‘on a
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generative principle of meaning), to the whole of his body (since it is a real and threatened part of it, while symbolically constituting the whole), to his identity (since it joins the force of a drive to the singularity of a history). 52
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donkey, back to back, their elbows tied to one another’s’ ” (MC 258). This grotesquely comic image of Henchard, now “bound” to the feminine he has made every effort to deny and evade, acts as a public, carnivalesque display of the private moment in the hay loft when “womanliness” was superimposed on his “virility.” As far as the skimmity-ride’s perpetrators are concerned, however, Henchard is not its main focus, as is clear from Nance Mockridge’s comment about Lucetta: “ ‘I do like to see the trimming pulled off such Christmas candles . . . I’d gie all my small silver to see that lady toppered . . . And perhaps I shall soon’ ” (MC 247–248). The newly prominent Mayor’s wife and to a lesser extent Farfrae himself are meant to be its targets and, according to Jopp, “ ‘[a]s a wind-up to the royal visit the hit will be all the more pat, by reason of their great elevation today’ ” (MC 249). Roger Ebbatson’s comments about the wider implications of this remnant of old Dorchester culture are revealing: The outburst of “rough music” in the skimmity-ride may gesture towards popular carnival, a symbolic inversion and subversion of authority, but it is also an expression of class conflict, brief but potent resistance to the ideology of the market that has created the stratified society of the modern borough with its excluded annex in Mixen Lane. The “freedom” and “equality” of the market, to which Farfrae will adhere, are specious or illusory forms of the social relations of production, a point neatly made when the Scotsman lowers his employee’s wages.55
In other words, the same “ideology of the market” that has marginalized the inhabitants of Mixen Lane is also responsible for the obsolescence of Henchard’s melodramatic masculinity, and it is fitting that this broadly dramatized protest (ultimately and predictably ineffectual in stemming changing economic forces though it may be) marks the end of that version of his identity. During his unsuccessful attempts to get Farfrae to return to Casterbridge to comfort the stricken Lucetta, whose shock at the scandal leads to the miscarriage that kills her, we are told that Henchard feels “unspeakably grieved” (MC 264) that no one will listen to him about the direction Farfrae has taken, that this creates in him “a state of bitter anxiety and contrition” (MC 264), which in turn leads to the following plea when he finally manages to catch up with his fellow townsman: “ ‘Oh, Farfrae, don’t mistrust me—I am a wretched man, but my heart is true to you still!’ ” (MC 266). This willingness to humble himself (as opposed to being humiliated) for the sake of someone else is new, and although the narrator states that after Farfrae refuses to believe him Henchard “cursed himself like a less scrupulous Job, as a vehement man will do when he loses self-respect” (MC 266), given his egotism throughout the narrative this
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experience is salutary. Kramer reads Hardy’s biblical allusion to Job as suggesting that “Henchard is too ready to curse himself, without an attempt at self-justification or a criticism of the universe,”56 so that whatever his vehemence the situation is presented as an instance of harsh selfaccountability for previous errors. But the skimmity-ride’s “uncanny revel” (MC 259) generates one final, even more occult opportunity for Henchard to face his past self, after he falsely tells Newson that Elizabeth-Jane is dead. This attempt to evade the consequences of his first defining act of melodramatic masculinity is perhaps better described as an act of deferral, since Henchard knows that his lie is unsustainable, and his resulting despair at the idea of losing Elizabeth-Jane leads to his decision to kill himself. The description of what happens as he stares into the weir-hole and prepares to drown himself is one of the most striking in the novel, and merits extended quotation. He looked backwards and forwards, and no creature appeared in view. He then took off his coat and hat, and stood on the brink of the stream with his hands clasped in front of him. While his eyes were bent on the water beneath there slowly became visible a something floating in the circular pool formed by the wash of centuries; the pool he was intending to make his death-bed. At first it was indistinct, by reason of the shadow from the bank; but it emerged thence, and took shape, which was that of a human body lying stiff and stark upon the surface of the stream. In the circular current imparted by the central flow the form was brought forward, till it passed under his eyes; and then he perceived with a sense of horror that it was himself. Not a man somewhat resembling him, but one in all respects his counterpart, his actual double, was floating as if dead in Ten-Hatches-Hole. The sense of the supernatural was strong in this unhappy man, and he turned away as one might have done in the actual presence of an appalling miracle. He covered his eyes, and bowed his head. Without looking again into the stream he took his coat and hat, and went slowly away. (MC 276— emphasis in the original)
What is remarkable about this passage is the detail with which it illustrates elements of Freud’s 1919 essay “The Uncanny,” the word explicitly used to evoke the skimmity-ride. On a prosaic level what Henchard is staring at is the discarded effigy of himself that has been thrown into the river in order to dispose of incriminating evidence, but since Henchard has not seen the skimmington figures of himself and Lucetta he has no idea that a rationalistic explanation is available.
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THE MAYOR OF CASTERBRIDGE
MELODRAMAS OF MASCULINITY
In presenting and expanding on the theories of Ernst Jentsch through an analysis of E. T. A. Hoffmann’s story “The Sand-Man,” Freud accepts that “a particularly favourable condition for awakening uncanny feelings is created when there is . . . uncertainty whether an object is alive or not, and when an inanimate object becomes too much like an animate one.”57 For both Jentsch and Freud this sense of unheimlich is most obviously generated by dolls and automatons, but there is something very similar going on in Hardy’s text. As Henchard gazes on what seems to be an apparition embodying the completed act of suicide he is in the process of fulfilling, the question becomes whether he is alive or not (which is the “real” Henchard, the breathing man standing on the bank or the drowned man floating “as if dead” in the pool?), so that the “doll” in the water generates a confusion of life and death representing the confusion of masculine selfhood that has been brought to a climax by the events leading to, and culminating in, this uncanny moment. Even more specific to Hardy’s text, however, is Freud’s extrapolation from this construction to the one he finds represented in Hoffmann’s novel The Devil’s Elixir, since the themes he sees being explored “are all concerned with the phenomenon of the ‘double,’ which appears in every shape and in every degree of development.”58 Henchard’s perception of his “actual double” drifting in circles below him reinforces his crisis of identity, because at such moments “the subject . . . is in doubt as to which his self is, or substitutes the extraneous self for his own. In other words, there is a doubling, dividing and interchanging of the self.”59 Unsurprisingly, and perhaps a little too predictably, this in turn leads to a classic Freudian construction, but its final implications are crucial to The Mayor of Casterbridge. This invention of doubling as a preservation against extinction has its counterpart in the language of dreams, which is fond of representing castration by doubling or multiplication of a genital symbol . . . Such ideas, however, have sprung from the soil of unbounded self-love, from the primary narcissism which dominates the mind of the child and of primitive man. But when this stage has been surmounted, the “double” reverses its aspect. From having been an assurance of immorality, it becomes the uncanny harbinger of death. The idea of the “double” does not necessarily disappear with the passing of primary narcissism, for it can receive fresh meaning from the later stages of the ego’s development. A special agency is slowly formed there, which is able to stand over against the rest of the ego, which has the function of observing and criticizing the self and of exercising a censorship within the mind, and which we become aware of as our “conscience” . . . The fact that an agency of this kind exists, which is able to treat the rest of the ego like an object— the fact, that is, that man is capable of self-observation—renders it possible
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Hardy uses Henchard’s uncanny moment of self-confrontation to represent his protagonist’s awakened conscience and the development of a “self-criticism” that sees the narcissism of his earlier form of masculinity for the egotistical expression of domination it was. The castration anxiety expressed is part of the fearful but necessary “death” of the hypermasculine manhood that is no longer tenable for Henchard. This represents an evolution in self-knowledge that is essential if Hardy’s protagonist is to achieve the status of a tragic hero, equivalent, in its more compressed way, to Lear’s expanded awareness on the heath and Oedipus’ at Colonos. For Henchard, as for his two predecessors, there is an element of “horror” to this “appalling miracle” because it first of all requires a complete and devastating rethinking of selfhood, and second because, as Freud notes, it forces the recognition of inevitable mortality. Nonetheless, the conscience and related maturity awakened are essential if the central character is to move beyond his original limitations, and in this case Hardy’s method also demonstrates how Henchard may experience such shifts without being able to fully express them, since they operate on a level of unconscious growth that defies articulation. Having described what he terms the “manifest motivation”61 of the double, Freud admits that “none of this helps us to understand the extraordinary strong feeling of something uncanny that pervades the conception,”62 and so further elaboration is required. Early in the essay he noted one obvious possibility: “what is ‘uncanny’ is frightening precisely because it is not known and familiar.”63 Having advanced his discussion he now finds a different explanation connected to the repetition involved in doubling, and to the idea that this arises at a “very early mental stage.”64 Freud now argues that “[a]ll these considerations prepare us for the discovery that whatever reminds us of this inner ‘compulsion to repeat’ is perceived as uncanny,” 65 which leads him to the following conclusion: among instances of frightening things there must be one class in which the frightening element can be shown to be something repressed which recurs. This class of frightening things would then constitute the uncanny; and it must be a matter of indifference whether what is uncanny was itself originally frightening or whether it carried some other affect . . . [I]f this is indeed the secret nature of the uncanny, we can understand why linguistic usage has extended das Heimliche into its opposite, das Unheimliche; for this uncanny is in reality nothing new or alien, but something which is familiar and old-established in the mind and which has become alienated from it only
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to invest the old idea of a “double” with a new meaning and to ascribe a number of things to it—above all, those things which seem to self-criticism to belong to the old surmounted narcissism of earliest times.60
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After the skimmity-ride but just before the arrival of Newson the narrator informs us that Henchard continually inquires after Lucetta’s health “as much on Farfrae’s account as on Lucetta’s, and on Elizabeth-Jane’s even more than on either’s. Shorn one by one of all other interests, his life seemed centering on the personality of his step-daughter . . . To see her on each occasion of his inquiry . . . was a comfort to him” (MC 268), and it is this increasingly concentrated focus on Elizabeth-Jane that explains the especially uncanny frisson of Ten-Hatches Weir. The return of the repressed embodied in the parade of characters that enter Casterbridge to reconnect Henchard to the novel’s primal scene of the wife sale, including Susan, Elizabeth-Jane, Mrs. Goodenough, and Newson, is a reminder of the event, but it is only through the accumulating crises of his public humiliation, fight with Farfrae, reaction to the skimmity-ride, lie to Newson, and encounter with his drowned double, that Henchard is forced finally to acknowledge the destructive significance of that initiatory act. After the auction, when Susan has left with Newson, Henchard belatedly declares “ ‘She’d no business to take the maid—’tis my maid; and if it were the doing again she shouldn’t have her!’ ” (MC 15). Henchard is preparing to kill himself because he believes that the loss of Elizabeth-Jane to Newson is about to recur (as it turns out, in “the doing again” Newson will, in fact, “have her” despite Henchard’s claim), only this time he understands completely the emotional and psychological implications for both the present and the past. That this Elizabeth-Jane is not the little girl he sold is irrelevant, since it is the relationship with her that he now realizes is vital, something he could only learn through the demolition of a masculinity that masked such insight.67 To return to Freud’s words, “this uncanny is in reality nothing new or alien, but something which is familiar and old-established in the mind and which has become alienated from it only through the process of repression,” a process that, having been exposed through the unheimliche encounter with his double, Henchard can now surmount by refusing the “inner compulsion to repeat” and leaving behind the self that generated it. This brings us back to Brooks and melodrama. As a psychological critic Brooks accepts the idea that “the force of melodrama derives from the very origins of theatricality, of selfdramatization, in the infantile dream world,”68 but he makes a distinction that is necessary in understanding the use of this form in The Mayor of Casterbridge. He argues
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through the process of repression. This reference to the factor of repression enables us, furthermore, to understand Schelling’s definition of the uncanny as something which ought to have remained hidden but has come to light.66
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it is important that, in talking of affective structure (which has most caught the attention of the best critics of melodrama), we not be deluded into thinking we are referring to the psychological structures of melodrama’s characters. There is no “psychology” in melodrama in this sense; the characters have no interior depth, there is no psychological conflict . . . What we have is a drama of pure psychic signs . . . that interest us through their clash, by the dramatic space created through their interplay, providing the means for their resolution. This space can resemble the structure of mind, nearly in a Freudian sense, or a medium comparable to the dream text, but only because it works through the play of pure, exteriorized signs.69
Although Brooks is talking specifically about the theater here, his observations are applicable to Hardy’s novel. Henchard’s contemplation of suicide is only the most overt scene of many in which the reader is excluded from any kind of interior access to the main character at a moment of extreme psychic stress, and is instead provided with a play of signs. Howe recognizes this when he observes “Henchard’s psychology is, of course, extraordinarily interesting, but it is a psychology neither analyzed nor minutely examined: we must infer it from the unfolding of his behavior”;70 yet he cannot refrain from criticizing what he describes as the “overplotting” and “relentless accumulation of intrigue”71 through which that behavior is presented. If we accept, however, that Hardy does not wish to reproduce the formalist realism that declares such excess a flaw, we can also accept that the text’s “melodrama of psychology” is an intentional and successful device. Further, Hardy’s presentation of Elizabeth-Jane demonstrates his ability to provide a different kind of psychological portrait. Judith Mitchell argues that in many of Hardy’s texts what she terms the “elisions of female consciousness” are “at least partly a result of [his] consistent avoidance of the technical device of free indirect speech, a favored technique among nineteenth-century novelists,”72 but this is not true of the presentation of Elizabeth-Jane. An early example occurs during her first encounters with Farfrae. She has overheard his conversation with Henchard through the thin walls of the Three Mariners, and as she observes his interaction with the denizens of its sitting room she falls into the following reverie. She admired the serious light in which he looked at serious things. He had seen no jest in ambiguities and roguery, as the Casterbridge toss-pots had done; and rightly not—there was none. She disliked those wretched humours of Christopher Coney and his tribe; and he did not appreciate them. He seemed to feel exactly as she felt about life and its surroundings— that they were a tragical rather than a comical thing; that though one could be gay on occasion, moments of gaiety were interludes, and no part of the actual drama. It was extraordinary how similar their views were. (MC 52)
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THE MAYOR OF CASTERBRIDGE
MELODRAMAS OF MASCULINITY
The gradual transition here from the narrator’s voice to Elizabeth-Jane’s, which is completed by her naïve (and incorrect) statement in the last sentence declaring the “extraordinary” similarity between her and Farfrae’s point of view, is a clear example of free indirect speech, a technique used increasingly to detail the development of her inner world, in sharp contrast with the presentation of her step-father. Also, as a number of critics have noted, Elizabeth-Jane tends to express a perspective that is suspiciously similar to that of her author’s, so that this slide from narrator to character is facilitated by Hardy’s sympathy with her position that life is “a tragical rather than a comical thing.” This is especially evident in the novel’s concluding paragraphs and last sentence, in which her final observation that “happiness was but the occasional episode in a general drama of pain” (MC 310) is manifestly voicing the authorial lesson that she has taken, and the reader is meant to take, from the novel’s events. Despite the theatrical language used in both these statements, however, Elizabeth-Jane’s willingness largely to internalize experience, and thus to avoid center stage in the drama of life, means that there is no real place of prominence available to her within the text’s melodramatic mode. Dalziel makes a good point when she suggests that “[i]f one were to read The Mayor of Casterbridge not as a tragedy but as a romance, Elizabeth-Jane would unquestionably be the heroine, her virtue rewarded by the reunion with her lost father and marriage to the man she has always loved,”73 but Hardy’s dependence on the melodramatic and sensational to generate his tragic effects ensures that Henchard’s externalized conflicts and occluded evolution remain the inescapable focus of the plot. In his survey of modern theories of tragedy Kramer observes that, despite their differences, most theories “assume, implicitly or explicitly, that intensity is a crucial quality in the tragic personae” and that “unless the author is able to make us realize that the protagonist is feeling deeply and suffering keenly, we are unlikely to become involved enough to catch a glimpse of the nature of existence that propels the protagonist.”74 It is just such intensity that melodrama generates through its extremes of action and excesses of emotion, and the transferal of melodrama’s effects from the theater to the novel via sensation fiction admirably suits Hardy’s purposes in The Mayor of Casterbridge. As Kramer also notes, “[t]here is no limit to the methods by which the author can create this intensity, and so the stress placed on this point does not constitute advocacy of one facet of tragedy over another: tragedy of character over tragedy of plot or tragedy of circumstances,”75 so that, for example, debates about whether or not Hardy’s reintroduction of the “goldfinch scene” at the end of the novel76 mars the text’s tragic “form” are essentially irrelevant, since its effectiveness does not rely upon such terms of reference. Hardy’s blending of melodrama
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and sensationalism employs, even while modifying, the moral occult in such a way as to emblematize the movement toward modernity that the plot establishes as part of Henchard’s tragedy. Brooks, as Gunning notes, believes melodrama began to decline in the mid-nineteenth century “with the pursuit of new categories of thrills and the cultivation of excitement and suspense”77 —in other words, with the growing influence of sensation drama and sensation fiction, forms that present “the modern environment as a series of shocks, filled with assaults on the senses,” and that “both portrayed and helped mediate the new abrasive experience of modernity.” 78 Like many Victorian critics of these genres, Brooks believes that the sensational intensities created distract from, not to say deny, any moral order (occluded or not) that may arise, so that melodrama later in the period “not only stages the drama of the moral occult but also its final dissolution, as sensation overwhelms significance.”79 Hardy, who began writing novels after this cultural moment was well established, partakes of its ideological ambiguities by showing his protagonist struggling to understand the internal and external forces destroying him even as he is finally unable to elucidate them for the reader, leaving the text’s sensational events as enigmatic sites of striking but never absolutely certain significance. It is this that allows Hardy to transform the moral sureties of melodrama into the ethical complexities of tragedy, an expression of the melodramatic mode increasingly available to someone of his aesthetic sense as the form itself evolved. Gunning makes a convincing case when he maintains that “what Brooks sees as the decadence of melodrama is really its necessary trajectory, as the moral occult becomes a tangle of contradictory discourses and the sense of personal identity and integrity on which a new moral order rested is dissolved by a growing sense of the precariousness of reason and the materiality of consciousness.”80 Hardy’s decision to use issues of masculinity as the focus of this materiality is effective because constructions of gender bridge the divisions between public and private, thus allowing him to illustrate how the collapse of Henchard’s performed manliness encompasses both spheres. The novel’s final scene, with Elizabeth-Jane and Farfrae arriving just too late to do anything except discover Henchard’s body and read his last words, provides a last melodramatic moment for its protagonist. As numerous critics have recognized, Henchard’s “Will,” with its apparent purpose of self-erasure through the culminating demand “that no man remember me” (MC 309), in fact ends with a reassertion of the self: “To this I put my name. Michael Henchard” (MC 309). This creates a fitting ambiguity for a character who, as she sets out to search for him, Elizabeth-Jane recognizes “had become a changed man . . . as far, that is, as change of emotional basis can justify such a radical phrase” (MC 305). Henchard dies
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THE MAYOR OF CASTERBRIDGE
MELODRAMAS OF MASCULINITY
a different man from the hay-trusser who sold his young family at the Weydon Priors fairground, but the exact magnitude of that difference is occluded to the very end. Nonetheless, it is clear that we are meant to see that change as an advance, and to sympathize with Henchard’s plight. In a notebook entry recorded in the Life Hardy asserts that “The best tragedy— highest tragedy in short—is that of the WORTHY encompassed by the INEVITABLE. The tragedies of immoral and worthless people are not of the best,”81 and this is as applicable to The Mayor of Casterbridge as it is to later tragedies such as Tess of the d’Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure. The inevitable, tragic obsolescence of Henchard’s larger-than-life excess in the cultural dialectic that envelops him is registered in this final irony—that his sensational life should find its concluding expression in “a crumpled scrap of paper” (MC 308) pinned to the bed that holds his insensate body. This ultimate concession to the written word, literally the “sign” that marks his demise, is left to be read by Farfrae and Elizabeth-Jane, the inheritors of the new world of abstraction, constraint, and self-control that written records represent, and that ultimately holds no place for Henchard or the melodramatic expression that so defines his character.
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Sensational Bodies, Melodramatic Spectacles—Far from the Madding Crowd and A Laodicean
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Part II
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“ ‘Kiss me too, Frank . . . You will Frank kiss me too!’ ”: Sensationalism, Surveillance, and Gazing at the Body in Far from the Madding Crowd
L
ike The Mayor of Casterbridge, Far from the Madding Crowd is often assigned a significant place within Hardy’s novelistic canon. His first major literary success, serialized in the prestigious Cornhill Magazine under the editorship of prominent Victorian man-of-letters Leslie Stephen, it provided the foundation upon which much of his later popularity would rest. This is true not least because this novel contains his earliest use of the word Wessex, and although that fictional landscape “did not exist in anything like the form we are now accustomed to, until the writing of his last three novels,”1 it would come to be seen as one of the defining elements of his work. That Hardy’s great strength as a novelist lay in his representation of rural life, based on his own intimate knowledge of the countryside of southwest England, seems fully confirmed by Far from the Madding Crowd, and the result is that, as Shires asserts, for “more than a hundred and twenty-five years, most commentary on this novel celebrated it as an organic pastoral through the transparent conventions of realism.” 2 Yet not all of Hardy’s original readers were so sure about these generic identifiers. The anonymous critic for the Westminster Review of January 1875, for one, had no doubts at all about the novel’s proper place: the fault of Far from the Madding Crowd is undoubtedly its sensationalism. We are not so well acquainted with Mr. Hardy’s previous writings as to entitle
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3
SENSATIONAL BODIES, MELODRAMATIC SPECTACLES
us to speak with perfect confidence, but as far as we can remember they were distinguished for their pastoral tone and idyllic simplicity rather than for violent sensationalism . . . But in Far from the Madding Crowd sensationalism is all in all. If we analyse the story we shall find that it is nothing else but sensationalism, which, in the hands of a less skilful writer than Mr. Hardy, would simply sink the story to the level of one of Miss Braddon’s earlier performances. Take the career of Gabriel Oak, who is the least sensational of the chief characters. He loses the whole of his property in a sensation scene of two or three hundred sheep being driven by a dog over a precipice. He finds his mistress in a sensation scene of blazing ricks. He regains her estimation in another sensation scene of thunder and lightning in the same rick-yard. So the story progresses in a succession of sensation scenes.3
Until very recently this acute and quite valid account of Far from the Madding Crowd had not received much notice, and the invocation of Braddon is especially uncomfortable, since by the mid-1870s she had come to represent the debased status of the sensation novel and those who produced it. Yet this discomfort is slowly dissipating for, as Fisher observes, while “[t]he ‘old’ Hardy criticism regarded texts like Desperate Remedies and A Laodicean as, at best, points along an authorial route to texts like Far from the Madding Crowd and The Mayor of Casterbridge . . . it is equally accurate to say that Far from the Madding Crowd is a point along the route from Desperate Remedies to The Hand of Ethelberta . . . The narrative and structure of Far from the Madding Crowd amplify and extend the schematic control of Desperate Remedies. There is more artifice here, not less.”4 Rather than dismissing the Westminster reviewer’s comments as an unfair attack, however, it is more productive to ask what insights become available if, instead of reading the novel as pastoral or as realism, we read it as sensation fiction. Hardy’s great innovation, of course, is to shift his story away from the urban middle-class households and aristocratic manors standard to sensation novels, and locate his action in a bucolic setting that, as his allusive title suggests, is supposedly far removed from the extremities of contemporary Victorian city life. This change in setting makes his sensationalism even more effective. If one of the goals of sensation fiction is to strip away the bland certainties of nineteenth-century bourgeois culture, and to suggest that beneath its surface lay unacknowledged conflicts and dissatisfactions, then Hardy’s demonstration that such conflicts and dissatisfactions also underlie the supposedly calm, fixed world of rusticity is doubly subversive. Most obviously, it explodes the stereotype of “Hodge,” the self-satisfied distortion of country dwellers common among Victorian urbanites, by demonstrating the complexity and indeed sophistication of character to be found outside the major population centers. Potentially titillating challenges to stereotypical belief were a part of what made sensation novels
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both popular and disturbing, so to the extent that Far from the Madding Crowd fulfills this function it meets generic expectations. But Hardy’s Wessex setting aims another level of critique at its middleclass audience. As George Wotten puts it, “[i]n class society, the age old conflict between town and country becomes a weapon in the class struggle. The real accretion of wealth and power by the industrial and financial bourgeoisie is masked by the myth of urban, particularly metropolitan ‘superiority,’ ” so that the text provides “an attack on the ideology of urban superiority, an attack mounted from a specific ideological position.”5 What the novel sensationally suggests is that urban and rural Victorian societies are united in the expression of excessive feeling, the enactment of extreme behavior, and indeed the occurrence of criminal and quasicriminal activity, in such a way that no artificial claims of “superiority” may be maintained on either side. In Penny Boumelha’s words, “[r]ural society, for Hardy, is just that: a society, in which exploitation, solidarity, and the struggle for survival are experienced quite as keenly as they are in urban settings.”6 The particular “ideological position” from which Hardy develops this viewpoint, however, is important in determining the specific employment of his sensational and melodramatic effects. Wotten argues that “[f]or Hardy the real tragedy of the rural workers was not their poverty or living conditions but the alien conformity which was being imposed on them,”7 and while this novel manages (just barely) not to be a tragedy, it is manifestly concerned with “conformity,” alien or otherwise. In particular, the text’s often-noted emphasis on spying and surveillance becomes a metonymy for a changing form of authority, one that applies to all strata of the social hierarchy represented, and one that can again be linked to Hardy’s use of sensation fiction. Cvetkovich has coined the phrase “discourse of affect”8 to describe how sensationalism sets out to provoke an intense emotional response from its readers, and she asserts that “[s]ensationalism renders social structures not just tangible or concrete, but visible. Borrowing from the theatrical melodrama, the sensation novel achieved its effects through spectacle. Sensational events often turn on the rendering visible of what remains hidden . . . and their affecting power arises from the satisfaction or thrill of seeing.”9 These theorizations are directly applicable to Far from the Madding Crowd, especially given that what Garson calls “[t]he peculiar role of looking and being looked at in Hardy’s novels, their downright voyeuristic dimension”10 is especially prominent in this novel, and it thus reproduces the specular, not to say scopophilic, impact of the sensational gaze. The text provides a series of sensation scenes and tableaux as a way of making the abstract concrete. Further, at the center of these are often melodramatically exposed human bodies, so that presenting the vulnerable
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FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD
SENSATIONAL BODIES, MELODRAMATIC SPECTACLES
human form becomes one of the novel’s methods for indecorously shocking the audience into ideological recognition. In Body Work: Objects of Desire in Modern Narrative, Brooks points out that the body in fiction becomes “a site of signification—the place for the inscription of stories— and itself a signifier, a prime agent in narrative plot and meaning,”11 all of which is true of Hardy’s story. Although the pastoral elements of Far from the Madding Crowd have caused it to be read as a celebration of rural verities and Arcadian stability, the sensationalism that drives its plot undercuts such certainties, so that the novel’s notoriously ambiguous conclusion indicates Hardy’s ambivalence not only about the final position of his heroine, but also about Weatherbury society as a whole. In Foucauldian terms, the text’s emphasis on the gazed-upon body suggests a significant shift in social constructions, because [i]n becoming the target for new mechanisms of power, the body is offered up to a new form of knowledge. It is the body of exercise, rather than of speculative physics; a body manipulated by authority, rather than imbued with animal spirits; a body of useful training and not of rational mechanics, but one in which, by virtue of that very fact, a number of natural requirements and functional constraints are beginning to emerge.12
An early novel such as this does not present the full ramifications of this disciplinary emphasis (that is reserved for late works such as Tess of the d’Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure), but it does provide Hardy with the opportunity to explore a transitional moment that is almost as revealing. The text’s use of melodramatic spectacle, however—in which excess refuses to succumb to restraint, and which also encourages sensory/sensual responses in its readers—produces potential sites of resistance that imply the new system of authority has yet to achieve full hegemony. It is interesting here to return to Howe, who, because he sees the novel as presenting an essentially positive progression toward maturity by its two main characters, once again touches on a crucial concern without fully recognizing its implications. According to him, “[w]hat moves and controls the book is a steady preoccupation with the problem of social discipline; discipline as it is gained through the release and containment of the passions, with both release and containment necessary for psychic growth,” so that “Gabriel and Bathsheba, painfully educated to the discipline of civilization, learn finally to discover their true feelings, feelings that would remain largely inaccessible to them except for the severities of discipline.”13 The problem with such a reading is the unexamined assumption that “true feelings” are somehow “discovered” through cultural discipline, rather than being constructed by it. Howe’s interpretation supports the lessons of
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learned self-control, but the kind of “self ” that is finally produced by that “control” is reified into an “actual self ” without fully recognizing either the coerciveness involved or the usefulness to “civilization” manufactured through such self-repression. Unsurprisingly, since women are conventionally supposed to require more imposed discipline than men, it is the female figure who is seen to benefit most from this, as “[t]he discipline won by Bathsheba signifies a capacity to adjust her strong sexual vanity to the requirements of social existence, and in this novel those requirements are not called into question.”14 But surely that last assertion can itself be called into question, for in its presentation of Bathsheba’s situation the novel presents more than the “touch of ruefulness”15 Howe is willing to concede. Far from the Madding Crowd is more complex than this, most obviously in its insistence that the newly forming disciplinary regime applies itself to both men and women. Brooks describes the “profound asymmetries in the specific treatment”16 of the male and female body, with the former “veiled from inquiry” while the latter is “well established as the erotic object of specifically gendered spectatorship,”17 yet it is just this dichotomy that is undercut by Hardy’s plot, with certain scenes centered on vulnerable bodies alternating the gendered object of the gaze. Hardy’s literal and sensational “embodiment” of his social/sexual commentary in Far from the Madding Crowd, and his willingness to display the male body as part of the text’s symbolic economy, moves it into a realm of discourse that significantly broadens its materialist analysis. This is not to say, of course, that the power of the gaze is absolutely equivalent across gender and class boundaries. In a patriarchal and hierarchical society certain “lookers,” usually male and/or economically advantaged, are privileged with more influence than others, usually female and/or poor. Yet even within such a system the text complicates the reader’s response as we observe various characters watching each other. Discussing Gabriel’s repeated spying on Bathsheba early in the plot, Morgan observes that “[a]s a figure of decorum and an observer of appearances, Oak’s mode of regard differs substantially from Hardy’s . . . Hardy establishes for Oak a contrasting perspective, indeed an openly conflicting perspective, from the very outset of the novel . . . Oak’s judgemental, censorious role openly conflicts with Hardy’s sense-impressionistic point of view.”18 Critics who, for example, too readily accept Oak’s evaluation at the end of the first chapter that, as “ ‘a handsome maid,’ ” Bathsheba’s greatest fault “ ‘is—well, what it is always . . . Vanity,’ ”19 fail to make a crucial distinction between the presentation of the male gaze and its trustworthiness. The incident of “espial” (FFMC 12) that has provoked this reaction, in which Bathsheba, perched outdoors on a stationary wagonload of household goods, looks at herself in a mirror, smiles, blushes, and then blushes at herself blushing, is one of
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What possessed her to indulge in such a performance in the sight of the sparrows, blackbirds and unperceived farmer, who were alone its spectators . . . nobody knows . . . She simply observed herself as a fair product of Nature in the feminine kind, her thoughts seeming to glide into far-off though likely dramas in which men would play a part . . . the smiles being of a phase suggesting that hearts were imagined as lost and won. Still, this was but conjecture, and the whole series of actions was so idly put forth as to make it rash to assert that intention had any part in them at all. (FFMC 12)
This passage, which uses the qualifiers “seeming,” “likely,” and “suggesting,” and which provides the overt statements that “nobody knows” what possesses Bathsheba to act as she does, and that it would be rash “conjecture” to guess at her “intention,” prevents the easy imposition of judgment.20 The potential disciplinary power of surveillance is presented and recognized through the character of Oak, but the text also suggests its limitations and inadequacies. There is nothing especially sensational about this scene, nor is sensationalism employed in Oak’s next instance of observing her, when he peers at Bathsheba and her aunt through a hole in the cattle-shed wall. The subsequent instance of his voyeurism, however, shows Hardy employing a very specific sensation fiction trope. Bathsheba’s willingness to go on an errand to pick up some oatmeal, despite the fact that her aunt does not own a side saddle, gives Gabriel his third opportunity to spy on her, and to watch her unconventional skills as a pony rider. Approaching the shepherd’s hut in which Oak has “ensconced himself ” (FFMC 19) so that he can peep through its loophole, Bathsheba suddenly encounters some low hanging branches across her path. It was not a bridle-path—merely a pedestrian’s track, and the boughs spread horizontally at a height not greater than seven feet above the ground, which made it impossible to ride erect beneath them. The girl, who wore no ridinghabit, looked around for a moment as if to assure herself that all humanity was out of view, then dexterously dropped backwards flat upon the pony’s back, her head over its tail, her feet against its shoulders and her eyes to the
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exposure because she does not know that Oak, hidden behind a hedge, is observing her. Later in the novel such unconscious exposure will become more literal, but for now the key point is that the narrative does not endorse the “cynical inference” that we are told is “irresistible by Gabriel Oak as he regarded the scene” (FFMC 12). Instead of supporting the idea that Bathsheba is driven by narcissism, the text insists on the indeterminacy of her motives.
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The performer seemed quite at home anywhere between a horse’s head and tail, and the necessity for this abnormal attitude having ceased with the passage of the plantation, she began to adopt another, even more obviously convenient than the first . . . Springing to her accustomed perpendicular like a bowed sapling, and satisfying herself that nobody was in sight, she seated herself in the manner demanded by the saddle, though hardly expected of the woman, and trotted off in the direction of Tewnell Mill. (FFMC 21–22)
In making Bathsheba such an accomplished, not to say acrobatic, horsewoman, Hardy invokes a controversy about women riders that links his novel to one of the most notorious early examples of sensation fiction, Braddon’s Aurora Floyd. Indeed, Bathsheba and Aurora share several congruities, something the Westminster Review critic no doubt had in mind when he associated the two authors who created them. Both female characters indulge in secret marriages to economically inferior men, both find their finances encumbered by these spendthrift husbands (each of whom has an unfortunate tendency to pick losers at the race track), both are led to believe (falsely) that their husbands are dead, both are associated with the quintessential sensation fiction crime of bigamy (Aurora through her actually bigamous marriage to John Mellish, Bathsheba through her potentially bigamous agreement to marry Boldwood), and both husbands are eventually removed from their lives when these inconvenient men are murdered by being shot. Aurora’s love of horses and riding is a metaphor for her unrestrained sexual passion and her unladylike dominance of the men around her, and it is not difficult to see that a similar dynamic is present in Far from the Madding Crowd. Bathsheba’s prostrate body, spread-eagled over the flanks of her pony, is both an erotic display and a symbolic declaration of sexual abandon, suggesting, as does her subsequent trotting off with her legs astride her mount, a rejection of the constraints placed on female desire and female “mobility,” whether physical, social, emotional, or erotic. As in the preceding scene on the wagon, the word “performance” is used here to describe her actions (FFMC 21), but this time there is no hint of self-satisfied assumptions about female weakness, because clichéd gender assumptions are clearly inadequate in the face of such a sensational demonstration of unpredictability. Further, since “the practice of women riding side-saddle has a great deal to do with the denial of covert sexual pleasure . . . [and] the fact that Bathsheba wears no riding habit means that the ‘decorous’ sartorial explanation for this suppression is also removed,”21 Hardy is actually more aggressive than Braddon in challenging
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sky . . . The tall lank pony seemed used to such doings, and ambled along unconcerned. Thus she passed under the level boughs.
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his audience. Aurora Floyd, remarkable young woman though she may be, is the daughter of a rich banker and the eventual wife of an aristocrat, and she is always properly attired when she rides.22 Hardy’s novel thus signals Bathsheba’s culturally subversive potential by connecting her to an earlier sister in sensationalism, and then makes her even more unconventional. But of course Bathsheba is very aware of the impropriety of her actions, so it is unsurprising that we are told she twice attempts to make sure no one is watching her equestrian gymnastics. Oak’s subsequent encounter with her, in which he shames her by letting her know that he has clandestinely observed this exhibition, appears to once again support the regulatory power of the male gaze. But even within this scene the text refuses to supply expected responses. As Oak approaches Bathsheba, he looks into her face, and we are told that [r]ays of male vision seem to have a tickling effect upon virgin faces in rural districts; she brushed hers with her hand, as if Gabriel had been irritating its pink surface by actual touch, and the free air of her previous movements was reduced at the same time to a chastened phase of itself. Yet it was the man who blushed, the maid not at all. (FFMC 22)
Oak’s blush, which indicates a shameful awareness of his own impropriety in stalking Bathsheba and spying on her, also reveals an embarrassment about his surveillance that undercuts its efficacy as a mode of control. Nonetheless, he does manage to make Bathsheba blush in return, for his blunt assertion “ ‘I saw you’ ” (FFMC 24) causes a “[r]ecollection of the strange antics she had indulged in when passing through the trees . . . [which was] succeeded in the girl by a nettled palpitation, and that by a hot face” (FFMC 24). Far from giving Oak any advantage, however, this exchange of blushes gives Bathsheba a reason to curtail even the slight interaction he has managed to create between them: Five mornings and evenings passed. The young woman . . . never allowed her vision to stray in the direction of Oak’s person. His want of tact had deeply offended her—not by seeing what he could not help, but by letting her know that he had seen it. Without law there is no sin, and without eyes there is no indecorum; and she appeared to feel that Gabriel’s espial had made her an indecorous woman without her own connivance. (FFMC 24)
In withholding her own “vision” Bathsheba refuses to accept either the validational or judgmental power of Oak’s “espial” (another word repeated from the wagon scene), resisting the typical construction of the objectified woman, who “watches herself being watched” by the male gaze, through erasing his presence in an ironic reclaiming of the invisibility that enabled
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his voyeurism. Commenting on this incident the narrator makes an arresting observation about the nature of law and decorum that in its insistence upon the need for an externalized, perceived presence to define transgression, supports Foucault’s idea that “[t]he exercise of discipline presupposes a mechanism that coerces by means of observation; an apparatus in which the techniques that make it possible to see induce effects of power, and in which, conversely, the means of coercion make those on whom they are applied clearly visible.”23 Hardy’s refusal to follow standard gender assignments in this system of power, however, is demonstrated on the very next page. Oak, having again taken up “his usual watch upon the cow-shed” (FFMC 25), this time fails to catch a glimpse of Bathsheba, so growing cold he returns to his shepherd’s hut and lights a fire in its stove. Temporarily distracted, however, he forgets to open one of the two vents in the shed, and quickly loses consciousness. How long he remained unconscious Gabriel never knew. During the first stages of his return to perception peculiar deeds seemed to be in course of enactment. His dog was howling, his head was aching fearfully—somebody was pulling him about, hands were loosening his neckerchief . . . The young girl with the remarkably pleasant lips and white teeth was beside him. More than this—astonishingly more—his head was upon her lap . . . and her fingers were unbuttoning his collar. (FFMC 25)
Here the novel presents its most exposed version of the body—the unconscious, recumbent human form vulnerable to uncontested observation and manipulation on multiple levels. It is the helplessness of this type of body that makes its representation sensationally shocking, and the paradoxical ability of an insensible figure to produce visceral responses of sympathy makes it a useful device for generating audience reaction. Of course in this case Bathsheba’s “pulling [Oak] about” saves his life, but Dalziel has correctly called Helen Paterson’s illustration of this incident for the Cornhill “quite sensational” (see Figure 1), and she is also right to point out that Bathsheba’s “depiction as literally (physically) above Gabriel effectively emphasizes her dominant (‘unwomanly’) position in relation to him at this time [since] she will soon refuse his marriage proposal.”24 In other words, the picture reinforces the text’s presentation of Bathsheba’s potentially subversive character, but in this case it reverses the perspective of the pony-riding scene by showing the male character draped out for display. Hardy demonstrates his willingness to resist assumptions about the inevitability of masculine social prerogatives through Gabriel’s passive exposure to Bathsheba and the reader’s gaze. The discernable erotic
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Figure 1 Hands were loosening his neckerchief.
charge in both text and illustration further complicates the question of who is dominant in this budding relationship. Bathsheba’s active loosening of Oak’s neckerchief and unbuttoning of his collar, emphasized in Paterson’s drawing, is a type of preparatory disrobing with obvious sexual overtones, and having awakened to the pleasant situation of finding his head in her lap, Gabriel indulges himself. He was endeavouring to catch and appreciate the sensation of being thus with her—his head upon her dress—before the event passed on into the heap of bygone things. He wished she knew his impressions; but he would as soon have thought of carrying an odour in a net as of attempting to convey the intangibilities of his feeling in the coarse meshes of language. So he remained silent. (FFMC 26)
The explicit statement that Oak appreciates the “sensation” of this risqué moment, and that the “impressions” and “feelings” he is experiencing cannot be verbalized, places him in an affective space of bodily reaction usually constructed as feminine. And the conclusion of this part of the narrative, which consists of some fairly aggressive flirtation between the two characters, consolidates the reversal that has taken place. Bathsheba’s offer to let Gabriel hold her hand a little longer, and then her suggestion that he may kiss it if he wishes, only to snatch it away when he protests he was
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not considering doing so, marks her complete control over the situation, and her full recovery from the embarrassment of her earlier bodily/sexual exposure. These two sensational viewings of the female and male form, juxtaposed in the same chapter, illustrate the text’s commitment to exploring the dynamics of sexuality in ways that refuse straightforward projections of agency and passivity. As Shires argues, in Far from the Madding Crowd “a connection of power with the male sex and victimization with the female sex oversimplifies the struggle of gender and power,”25 which in turn means that issues of surveillance and discipline within its plot are also multifaceted. Early in the novel Hardy invokes paradigms of the gaze that appear to encourage standard readings of its influence, only to immediately problematize those responses in preparation for the complications to follow. And one of those complications includes the employment of melodramatic spectacle as a counterweight to clandestine observation. Obviously in a novel an author cannot supply the spectacular special effects that thrilled Victorian theatrical audiences, but Hardy’s vivid set pieces serve a similar purpose. Booth suggests that “one finds in the development of the spectacle style a social and cultural microcosm of the age.”26 The public, communal, and excessive nature of nineteenth-century spectacle resists both internalization and atomization, so that although Foucault focuses primarily on “punishment-as-spectacle”27 (an idea that will become significant at the end of the novel), any form of spectacular engagement has the potential to subvert the disciplinary urge. Nonetheless, Far from the Madding Crowd does not provide any utopian possibility that spectacle somehow holds the key to turning back the newly arising paradigm—instead, it uses this melodramatic device to establish contrasts that emphasize the transitional moment it is fictionalizing, and a good example of this occurs in “Chapter VI—The Fair: The Journey: The Fire” (FFMC 43). The Westminster Review’s description of this chapter’s conclusion as a “sensation scene” serves a double purpose, since it not only connects the novel to sensation fiction, but it also specifically employs the technical term used for such interludes in Victorian melodrama. It is doubtful that the phrase was meant as a compliment in either sense, but there is no doubt that the straw rick fire battled by Gabriel and the workfolk of Little Weatherbury Farm presents the necessary characteristics required for the designation. Fires were a staple of sensation melodrama, not least because the use of flash pots and dramatic lighting made them relatively easy to simulate, and the frantic activity and danger portrayed by Hardy is precisely what a melodrama’s audience looked for in its sensation scenes. But the events leading up to the fire are as important as the spectacular event that is their climax, and they need to be analyzed in conjunction with each other.
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The chapter begins two months after Oak has lost his sheep farm through the death of his flock, and opens by presenting his complete inability to find a position during the Casterbridge hiring fair. Presenting himself first as a bailiff, and getting no offers of employment, Gabriel then decides he must lower his expectations, and, after purchasing a shepherd’s crook and exchanging his overcoat for a “shepherd’s regulation smockfrock” (FFMC 44), he puts himself on the market in that capacity, equally unsuccessfully. The reason for this second failure, however, is revealing. Now that Oak had turned himself into a shepherd it seemed that bailiffs were most in demand. However, two or three farmers noticed him and drew near. Dialogues followed, more or less in the subjoined form: “Where do you come from?” “Norcombe.” “That’s a longish way.” “Fifteen miles.” “Whose farm were you upon last?” “My own.” This reply invariably operated like a rumour of cholera: the enquiring farmer would edge away, and shake his head dubiously. Gabriel like his dog, was too good to be trustworthy, and he never made advance beyond this point. (FFMC 44)
Here an older classificatory procedure assigns Oak to a set category that, at this point, he is powerless to resist. He cannot be both a shepherd-for-hire and an independent farmer, not only because such designations are mutually exclusive, but also because any hint that he might want to rise from the one to the other means he is untrustworthy. However, as the novel proceeds his ability to slowly regain the status position he has lost demonstrates his affiliation with an increasing economic mobility available through the capitalist market economy now penetrating Wessex. Numerous critics have noted the deracination that typifies many of the main characters,28 which further suggests a growing fluctuation of social movement that separates people from their communal identity. To this extent, then, the novel implies the rise of a disciplinary power that “[i]nstead of bending all its subjects into a single uniform mass . . . separates, analyses, differentiates, carries its procedures of decomposition to the point of necessary and sufficient single units,”29 but this is manifestly not what happens during the sensation scene that follows Oak’s decision to seek employment elsewhere.
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Having traveled to Weatherbury simply because he has heard that this is where Bathsheba has gone, Gabriel is about to walk into the village when “he noticed on his left hand an unusual light—appearing about half a mile distant . . . [s]omething was on fire” (FFMC 47). Hardy’s description of the burning rick is, characteristically, both accurate in its depiction of how a pile of straw would burn and flamboyant in its depiction of how the flames are battled. The turmoil and excitement of the scene is communicated effectively, but what is also communicated is the collective engagement with the narrowly averted disaster. Gabriel leapt over the hedge, and saw that he was not alone. The first man he came to was running about in a great hurry as if his thoughts were several yards in advance of his body, which they could never drag on fast enough . . . Other figures now appeared behind this shouting man and among the smoke, and Gabriel found that far from being alone he was in a great company—whose shadows danced merrily up and down, timed by the jigging of the flames, and not at all by their owners’ movements. The assemblage—belonging to that class of society which casts its thoughts into the form of feeling, and its feelings into the form of commotion—set to work with a remarkable confusion of purpose. (FFMC 49)
There is some condescension toward the rustic characters here,30 yet although we are led to believe that without Oak’s organization of the farmworkers the blaze would have spread disastrously, it is also obvious that without their help he could not have contained this crisis. The image of Oak sitting “astride the very apex” (FFMC 49) of the burning rick “sweeping the stack and dislodging all fiery particles” (FFMC 50) is certainly sensationally spectacular, so that the chapter’s stirring conclusion encourages a shared excitement between the novel’s readers and its characters by creating a sense of mutual experience reflecting the rural community’s shared involvement in saving the harvested crop. It is fitting, therefore, that as the narrative shifts to Bathsheba’s perspective on the fire, Gabriel (who is, of course, a stranger to Weatherbury’s inhabitants) is described as “a shepherd,” “a fine young shepherd,” and “that bold shepherd” by those watching him scatter the embers at the top of the rick with his shepherd’s crook (FFMC 50). Affiliated with his communal task by the iconic tool of his trade, he is subsumed into the precapitalist group classification appropriate to a scene that, through its links to melodrama, has emphasized collectivity over individuality, a reading reinforced by the chapter’s concluding encounter between Gabriel and the “woman-farmer” (FFMC 51) whose property he has just saved.
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Oak, his features smudged, grimy, and undiscoverable from the smoke and heat, his smockfrock burnt into holes and dripping with water . . . advanced with the humility stern adversity had thrust upon him up to the slight female in the saddle. He lifted his hat with respect and . . . stepping close to her hanging feet he said in a hesitating voice,
She lifted the wool veil tied round her face, and looked all astonishment. Gabriel and his cold-hearted darling Bathsheba Everdene were face to face. Bathsheba did not speak, and he mechanically repeated in an abashed and sad voice, “Do you want a shepherd, ma’am?” (FFMC 51)
His attempt at social mobility turned back Gabriel accepts the group designation assigned to him, and his apparent surrender of any further aspirations for advancement shifts him (for now) from the position of watcher to someone being overseen. After Oak is hired by Bathsheba and becomes a minor member of the farming community at Weatherbury, therefore, the focus of the narrative moves from his situation to hers. Although her rise in status through the death of her uncle, and her inheritance of his farm, continues to keep questions of social mobility in play, the gender issues that result largely overshadow them. Bathsheba’s transgressive qualities now have a much wider arena in which to find expression, first through her insistence on fulfilling the supposedly masculine prerogative of running her own agricultural business, and second through her relationships with the two additional suitors who appear to challenge Gabriel’s love for her, and who will reinforce Hardy’s continued employment of the trope of gazing and watching to explore his broader concerns of shifting cultural authority. It is now a critical commonplace, although an obviously still valid one, to note that Bathsheba’s disastrous relationship with Boldwood is initiated because he at first evinces no desire to look at her. As the only woman at the Casterbridge corn-market she draws all other eyes to her, and we are told that “the sensation was so pronounced that her instinct on two or three occasions was merely to walk as a queen among these gods of the fallow . . . and to neglect closing prices altogether” (FFMC 91–92). Boldwood’s refusal to feel the “sensation” (in both meanings of the word) generated by her appearance results in her desire to attract his gaze, but once attracted it will turn out to be impossible to escape, with devastating consequences. As Liddy remarks to her mistress, “ ‘Men be such a terrible class of society to look at a body’ ” (FFMC 93), and after Boldwood becomes obsessed with Bathsheba’s person and body he is almost literally
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“Do you happen to want a shepherd, ma’am?”
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“after Miss Everdene got home she went out again to see all was safe as she usually do, and coming in found Baily Pennyways creeping down the granary steps with half a bushel of barley. She fleed at him like a cat—never such a tom-boy as she is . . . and to cut a long story short he owned to having carried off five sack altogether, upon her promising not to persecute him. Well, he’s turned out neck and crop, and my question is, who’s going to be baily now?” (FFMC 69)
Bathsheba, keeping her assets under close watch, manages to catch the thief who is diminishing her capital, and of course the answer to Henery’s question is that she will usurp male privilege and become her own bailiff (“such a tom-boy as she is”). As a property owner Bathsheba has a gaze of her own, and a committed intention to maintain direct surveillance over those in her employ. But as a woman her willingness and ability to impose such control, especially on the men around her, presents a direct challenge to assumptions about acceptable female agency. Daryl Ogden argues that in this novel Hardy intimates that ownership of a masculine gaze is not confined to men alone . . . possession of a masculine gaze is culturally determined by the social production of masculinely gendered subjects who are granted empowered status—status the great majority of Victorian countrywomen did not possess independent of their fathers or husbands. Bathsheba Everdene’s entree into an elite social class thereby confers upon her not simply material wealth, but also invests her gaze with a kind of symbolic capital that makes available for Bathsheba masculine scopic practices.31
One way of understanding what happens between her and Boldwood, therefore, is that he attempts to superimpose his “legitimate” gaze onto her “illegitimate” one, since the success of his efforts to coerce her into marriage would reestablish a proper supervisory function that keeps women safely subordinate. This becomes most obvious in that, through his constant pursuit of her, Boldwood tends to appear at her side during scenes in which Bathsheba is overseeing important events in the agricultural calendar, such as the sheep shearing in the Great Barn. Here we are told of the various men doing the shearing that “[n]one of these were clothed to any extent worth mentioning” because of the June heat (FFMC 142), and that “[b]ehind all was Bathsheba, carefully watching the men”
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unable to look away. What is less often commented upon is that an act of observation puts Bathsheba in the corn-market in the first place. Henery Fray, breathlessly describing the firing of the farm’s bailiff to the denizens of Warren’s Malthouse, reports that
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(FFMC 144). Boldwood’s unexpected arrival interrupts her close observation of these exposed, near-naked male bodies, and after some conversation with him she goes into the house, reappearing “in her new riding habit of myrtle green which fitted her to the waist as a rind fits its fruit” (FFMC 147), which leads to the two of them riding off together. Propriety, as symbolized by her close-fitting riding habit (no pony tricks or riding astride here), is reestablished by Boldwood’s constricting presence, and the dominating, potentially scopophilic, female gaze is safely redirected. Unsurprisingly, therefore, his first proposal to her is couched in terms that suggest restricted autonomy, contained vision, and lessened mobility. “But you will just think—in kindness and condescension think—if you cannot bear with me as a husband! . . . believe me I will take more care of you than would many a man of your own age . . . You shall have no cares—be worried by no household affairs, and live quite at ease, Miss Everdene. The dairy superintendence shall be done by a man—I can afford it well—you shall never have so much as to look out of doors at haymaking time—or to think of weather in the harvest. I rather cling to the chaise, because it is the same my poor father and mother drove, but if you don’t like it I will sell it and you shall have a pony-carriage of your own. I cannot say how far above every other idea and object on earth you seem to me—Nobody knows—God only knows—how much you are to me!” (FFMC 129)
That Bathsheba might not wish to have the superintendence of her financial affairs “done by a man,” that she might quickly tire of never looking “out of doors,” and that she might not wish to exchange actually riding a pony for a “pony-carriage,” never occurs to him, so that although “Boldwood’s feelings are heartfelt, they show how much he is dominated by presuppositions about his role in courtship and marriage and too little about what Bathsheba would need and want.”32 His assertion that she is the “object” that dominates his world is also revealing. Three times in the proposal scene Boldwood declares, “ ‘I want you,’ ” (FFMC 127–128) culminating in his hope that he may “ ‘obtain’ ” her (FFMC 129) for his own. Clearly Boldwood perceives Bathsheba as a possession to be attained, and once having secured the immobilized object of his desire, he will be free to gaze upon it/her without interruption. This controlling vision is presented as more than a little problematic, but Hardy’s method of fully revealing the pathological nature of Boldwood’s passion is to associate him with improperly melodramatic excess that neither leads to any kind of self-awareness nor provides the possibility of successful social interrogation. Devereux notes that Boldwood “is given to scenes of high melodrama,”33 and to the extent that he is acting out an especially virulent type of masculinity in his efforts to objectify Bathsheba he can be linked to Henchard’s
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equally melodramatic performance of manliness. The essential difference between the two characters, however, is that while Henchard eventually is forced to perceive the inadequacy of his enactment, once Boldwood’s is established he is utterly incapable of seeing past it. Both men are trapped in a changing cultural discourse to which they cannot adapt, but whereas Henchard’s isolation and destruction are represented as tragic, Boldwood’s never achieve more than a qualified pathos—qualified because of his threats and barely contained rage toward Bathsheba when she refuses to succumb to his advances. In presenting Boldwood this way Hardy reduces the reader’s sympathy for him by associating him with the villains of stage melodrama, thus distinguishing him from Troy, who will be given a different melodramatic role to play. Like the antagonist in many Victorian plays, Boldwood’s pursuit of Bathsheba is so relentless that it becomes essentially self-defeating, much like Manston’s pursuit of Cytherea in Desperate Remedies. Maintained in the face of self-interest and, indeed, often enough in the face of self-preservation, villainous persecution of the heroine in order to force her sexual surrender was a mainstay of nineteenth-century stage plotting, providing as it did not only the affective charge of a woman in jeopardy, but also the opportunity to wholeheartedly scorn any man who could stoop to such wickedness. Hardy takes this trope further later in his career through the figure of Alec d’Urberville and, in its mocking but largely positive review of Tess, Punch describes this type of character as one who, “in an Adelphi Drama of the most approved type . . . his eyes ablaze with passion,” tends to utter such lines about the heroine as “ ‘Aha! A day will come!’ or ‘She must and shall be mine!’ ”34 Boldwood is not presented as quite so dastardly, but the aptly entitled “Chapter XXXI—Blame: Fury” (FFMC 198) suggests that the potential is there, and at times he sounds much like this satirical sketch. Although the sensational meeting between Boldwood and Bathsheba, which occurs after he has received her letter finally turning down his proposal and learned about her growing relationship with Troy, is too long to be quoted in its entirety, certain elements may be usefully excerpted. The scene begins uncomfortably, and deteriorates from there. “O—is it you, Mr Boldwood,” she faltered, a guilty warmth pulsing in her face. Those who have the power of reproaching in silence may find it a means more effective than words. There are accents in the eye which are not on the tongue . . . Boldwood’s look was unanswerable. Seeing she turned a little aside, he said, “What, are you afraid of me?” “Why should you say that?” said Bathsheba.
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“I fancied you looked so,” said he. “And it is most strange, because of its contrast with my feeling for you.”
This exchange of look, counter-look, and interpretation of looks once again suggests a battle of gazes, and although it may end with Bathsheba apparently calm and self-possessed (a loaded term given Boldwood’s desire to “obtain” her), when the encounter proceeds into full melodramatic mode she finds herself at a considerable disadvantage. His explosive outburst, “ ‘O Bathsheba—have pity upon me . . . God’s sake yes—I am come to that low, lowest stage—to ask a woman for pity!’ ” provides, as she observes, “ ‘little honour to the woman in that speech’ ” (FFMC 199–200), so that Boldwood’s underlying misogyny and sense of emasculation at being reduced to the “spectacle of a man showing himself to be so entirely the vane of a passion” (FFMC 200) is part of what drives his anger. His subsequent declaration—“ ‘I am beyond myself about this, and am mad’ ” (FFMC 200)—may therefore be understood as a gendered reaction based on being turned into a melodramatic spectacle for others to observe, a humiliation compounded not just of his unrequited desire, but also of the communal knowledge that he has been thrown over for another man. Boldwood’s fury, therefore, peaks at his sense of being publicly exposed. “Why didn’t he win you away before, when nobody would have been grieved—when nobody would have been set talebearing—Now the people sneer at me—the very hills and sky seem to laugh at me till I blush shamefully for my folly. I have lost my respect—my good name—my standing—lost it, never to get it again. Go and marry your man—go on! . . . As for me, I had better go somewhere alone, and hide,—and pray. I loved a woman once. I am now ashamed. When I am dead they’ll say, miserable lovesick man that he was. Heaven—Heaven—if I had got jilted secretly, and the dishonour not known, and my position kept! But no matter—it is gone, and the woman not gained. Shame upon him. Shame!” (FFMC 202–203)
Although Bathsheba comes very close to being overwhelmed by the extremity of this eruption, she does eventually manage to flare up and declare “ ‘[i]t is unmanly to attack a woman so!’ ” (FFMC 203),35 a sentiment the reader is no doubt meant to accept. Despite Boldwood ostensibly shifting his animus toward Troy as the scene draws to a close, he still manages to apostrophize Bathsheba as a “sweet lost coquette” even as he begs her pardon (FFMC 204), so that the ambivalence of his desire for her is made explicit. It is his sense of being watched and derided that drives his
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“unreasonable anger” (FFMC 203), and in the end what is exposed is not only Boldwood’s failure to secure a wife, but also the egotistical nature that underlies his passion. Boldwood is not overtly the novel’s villain, but his coercive attitude toward Bathsheba does evoke standard stage villainy of the period, and therefore helps ensure that that the novel’s audience stays identified with its unconventional heroine, who is presented as harassed and victimized by her solipsistic lover’s histrionic excess. Of course the event that forestalls, but certainly does not erase, Boldwood’s unhealthy fixation on Bathsheba is the successful effort of Troy to court and marry her. The scene in which Troy, returning to Weatherbury after his secret marriage to Bathsheba, taunts Boldwood by pretending to accept his money to go away and “save” her reputation, only to toss the coins and notes into the road at his feet after revealing the fact of their wedding, is one of the most painful in a novel notable for excruciating incidents. The designation of Troy by the text here as “a trickster” (FFMC 222, 224)36 reveals the melodramatic role Hardy has contrived for him, because if Boldwood is a modified version of a stage melodrama’s villain, then Bathsheba’s first husband is a qualified version of an almost equally common theatrical mainstay: the “cad” or “bounder” figure. Morgan suggests that Troy does not “readily conform to type as the kind of reckless libertine . . . familiar . . . in Victorian melodrama,”37 and while it is true he does not match earlier versions of this standard dramatis persona, by mid-nineteenth century the bounder had evolved away from his eighteenth-century roots of overt libertinism and turned into the more restrained “smooth operator” of bourgeois domestic theater. Angus McLaren, in his chapter on “Cads” in The Trials of Masculinity: Policing Sexual Boundaries 1870–1930, observes that by the last quarter of the century this type of character “was credited with a dangerous power of fascination over women,” and that he “was accordingly the man who was said to look upon all women as fair game,”38 a description that certainly describes Troy, who, the novel’s narrator informs us, “was moderately truthful to men, but to women lied like a Cretan” (FFMC 166). We are also provided with the following summary of this “philosopher’s” (FFMC 168) general approach toward gender relations: “He had been known to observe casually that in dealing with womankind the only alternative to flattery was cursing and swearing. There was no third method. ‘Treat them fairly and you are a lost man,’ he would say” (FFMC 168). Such an attitude sounds villainous enough, but the essential difference between the melodramatic villain and the melodramatic cad is that, while the first attempts to force himself upon the heroine by imposing his gaze, the second draws the heroine toward him by encouraging her to gaze at him and no one else. The temptation thus created causes the heroine to look away from the worthy
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hero, and the suspense of this melodramatic plot depends on the audience’s fear that she will recognize too late the error of her misplaced desire. That such a narrative arc is active in Far from the Madding Crowd is obvious, but the interesting way in which Hardy uses this convention both links and differentiates the two melodramatic competitors for Bathsheba. Whereas Boldwood is moved to an almost uncontrollable fury at the idea of becoming a spectacle, Troy is perfectly satisfied to make himself a spectacle if it furthers his seduction. Indeed, one might argue that his goal is to be as spectacular as possible, something aided by his glamor as a soldier, since the more he can dazzle his female audience the greater his chance to win his game. As a cad, therefore, Troy’s body and its accoutrements are on constant display, and Bathsheba’s first glimpse of him, “brilliant in brass and scarlet” (FFMC 162), begins a process of, in MacLaren’s words, “dangerous . . . fascination” that will dominate the middle part of the text. This is not to imply that Troy does not himself possess a strong power of looking, for we are informed that at this originating moment of their relationship “[h]e looked hard into her eyes when she raised them for a moment: Bathsheba looked down again, for his gaze was too strong to be received pointblank with her own” (FFMC 162). However, it is Troy’s callous power to attract and manipulate the female gaze that makes him destructive, and Hardy demonstrates that Troy poses a similar, if differently focused, threat to his heroine than Boldwood does through his creation of a parallel cause for their first encounters with Bathsheba. Just as the exposure and dismissal of her dishonest bailiff, and thus her original sighting of Boldwood in the corn market, comes about because of her careful observation of her property, her (literal) entanglement with Troy in the dark fir plantation occurs because “[a]mong the multifarious duties which Bathsheba had voluntarily imposed upon herself by dispensing with the services of a bailiff, was the particular one of looking round the homestead before going to bed, to see that all was right and safe for the night” (FFMC 160). Once again a situation in which Bathsheba demonstrates her autonomy leads to the potential undercutting of that autonomy, for where Boldwood would have replaced her economic authority with his own, Troy will drain her economic resources through his feckless profligacy. As William Mistichelli succinctly puts it, “Boldwood would ask that she give up her capacity for useful public labor; Troy would require that she support him as a dependent. Both men would rob her of her fullness to accommodate their more limited natures.”39 Each of these suitors is revealed as unsuitable for both the novel’s main female character and for dealing with the materialist realities of their agrarian culture, since Boldwood, once he becomes obsessed with Bathsheba, is rendered unfit to run his farm, while Troy is never concerned enough to learn how to do
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so successfully in the first place. It will take Bathsheba some time to recognize her soldier-lover’s failings, however, since his willingness to make a seductive spectacle of his body overwhelms her ability to see him clearly, and awakens sensations that prove impossible to resist. J. B. Bullen rightly describes Bathsheba and Troy’s accidental first meeting among the firs as “a brilliant piece of Victorian melodrama,”40 and Hardy contrasts its striking theatrical effect with their subsequent, apparently mundane conversation the next morning “on the verge of the haymead” (FFMC 169). Yet although Troy is not physically spectacular here, the scene is still important in its evocation of another quality that links him to melodrama’s cad figure—his ability to manipulate women through language. In addition to physical display, the cad also relies on “sweet talk” to draw his female victim toward him, which again places him in contrast to the melodramatic villain (who tends toward aggressive assertions of intent) and the melodramatic hero (who tends toward either honest straight talk or tongue-tied silence). As we shall see, this has significant gender implications, but for now it is only necessary to note that Troy’s skilful flirtatiousness and practiced flattery are devastatingly effective. His allusion to their previous night’s encounter leads to this exchange. “I am afraid I have made a hole with my tongue that my heart will never mend. O these intolerable times: that ill luck should follow a man for honestly telling a woman she is beautiful! ’Twas the most I said—you must own that; and the least I could say—that I own myself.” “There is some talk I could do without more easily than money.” “Indeed. That remark is a sort of digression.” “No. It means that I would rather have your room than your company.” “And I would rather have curses from you than kisses from any other woman; so I’ll stay here.” Bathsheba was absolutely speechless. (FFMC 169)
Even though she eventually manages to regain her voice, and attempts to continue her give and take with Troy, Bathsheba is at a complete disadvantage in this kind of contest, and Troy’s ability to even momentarily rob of her of language foreshadows greater disempowerments to come. His ability to maneuver her into acknowledging that she knows about her own beauty, and that therefore she on some level accepts his blandishments as deserved, is unequivocally described by the narrator as a “capitulation” (FFMC 171), so that “the moment was the turning-point of a career. Her tone and mien signified beyond mistake that the seed which was to lift the
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foundation had taken root in the chink: the remainder was a mere question of time and natural changes” (FFMC 171). The “careless sergeant” (FFMC 171) defeats Bathsheba through his caddish facility in arousing female desire by self-exhibitionism and verbal connivance, and in the end she is left in “a perfect simmer of distress” (FFMC 175), “brimming with agitated bewilderment” (FFMC 176), and with “[h]er heart erratically flitting hither and thither from perplexed excitement, hot, and almost tearful” (FFMC 177). Successful as he may seem, however, Hardy’s next presentation of Troy undercuts him, and his seductive power, by evoking the specific late-Victorian critique of this melodramatic type. The short scene in which Troy helps Bathsheba hive her bees is a prelude to what is perhaps the most famous one in the novel: his demonstration to her of the sword-exercise. Certainly the second of these is theatrically sensational, while the first seems primarily comic, but they are thematically connected. The necessity for Troy to don Bathsheba’s protective gear—the “veil and gloves” and “broadbrimmed hat” (FFMC 179)—in order to catch the swarm is a moment of cross-dressing masquerade in which he “plays the spectacle for Bathsheba” while at the same time “being feminized.”41 Again, he is more than willing to put himself on even foolish display as long as it helps him gain his goal of female submission, which indeed it does, since “[h]e looked such an extraordinary object in this guise that, flurried as she was, she could not avoid laughing outright,” and this removes “yet another stake from the palisade of cold manners which had kept him off ” (FFMC 179). But Troy’s brief construction as a woman hints at the underlying ambiguities of his apparently unassailable masculine persona. By the 1870s the cad, whose threat (and paradoxical attractiveness) in earlier manifestations was embodied by his driving male sexuality, was now being reconstituted as a failure because of that same quality. As McLaren puts it, “the Don Juan figure, who devoted his energy to amorous conquests rather than to social accomplishments, was increasingly castigated by serious middle-class men as a ‘feminine’ type. Accordingly, ‘don juanism’ was to attract the attention of Gregorio Maranon, Spain’s foremost sexologist, who was interested in the indecisiveness of the seducer’s sexuality.”42 Hardy uses Troy’s moment of androgyny to hint that the melodramatically excessive display of hypermasculinity that follows, whose intended purpose is to advance his seduction, is also a kind of overcompensation, a phallic display meant to reassure the gallant sergeant that his concentration on women and his willingness to court their gaze (all the while being unable to advance himself socially) has not significantly compromised his manliness. There is no need to rehearse one more time the overdetermined sexual implications of Bathsheba’s waiting, “trembling and panting,” for Troy to arrive at “the hollow amid the ferns” so that, “producing [his] sword,”
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which is “like a living thing,” he can deliver a series of “thrusts” at her with it (FFMC 181). More significant is his insistence that he “ ‘can’t perform’ ” (FFMC 183) his subsequent blade tricks unless she remains perfectly still. Troy’s performance depends on a completely immobilized and passive female subject because, even as he gazes intensely at her body in order to encompass it with his blade, she is staring as intently at the spectacle of his body putting on a show for her, thus suggesting not only the artificial theatricality of his attractiveness but also his ambiguous gender role as a reciprocal object of the gaze. Although there can be no doubt that Bathsheba is for the moment overcome by his phallic display, since we are told that “[s]he felt powerless to withstand or deny him” (FFMC 185), and there can likewise be no denial of her sexual arousal, since when he kisses her it brings “the blood beating into her face, [and] set[s] her stinging as if aflame to the very hollows of her feet” (FFMC 185), whether Troy can sustain these responses outside of such carefully self-generated sensation scenes remains very much an open question. For Susan Beegel he never becomes more than “a false front of words and a red uniform, a cardboard cutout,”43 and this is precisely Hardy’s point in associating him with the stereotypical cad of the Victorian stage. His eager acceptance of the role of seducer may give him a certain kind of male power, but this is revealed as ultimately ephemeral and self-defeating, something Troy only discovers once he can no longer impose his version of the melodramatic mode on the women around him. Crucially, therefore, in order to be effective Troy’s self-display must remain detached from the context of marriage. This is first hinted at in the short chapter presenting his and Fanny’s failed attempt to wed.44 Because Fanny has mistakenly gone to the wrong church, Troy is left alone standing before the altar, the focus of attention of a “small congregation, consisting mainly of women and girls” (FFMC 115). He is certainly a spectacle for this female audience as he strides up the aisle, but we are told he does so “with an embarrassment which was only the more marked by the intense vigour of his step, and by the determination upon his face to show none,” and that “[a] slight flush had mounted his cheek by the time he had run the gauntlet between these women” (FFMC 115). Removed from his status as rakish seducer and teetering on the edge of becoming merely a husband, the longer Troy attracts the female gaze in the church the more he is reduced to an object of mockery, and eventually “[t]here began . . . that slight shifting of feet, that artificial coughing . . . which betrays a nervousness. At length there was a titter . . . The clock ticked on. The women threw off their nervousness, and titters and giggling became more frequent” (FFMC 116). Like his female counterpart the coquette, once placed within the matrix of social, economic, and religious responsibilities that come
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with marriage, the cad’s calling attention to himself becomes not only superfluous but also vaguely ridiculous. Of course the real victim of this scene is Fanny, who, arriving too late to fulfill the ceremony, is bluntly told by Troy “ ‘I don’t go through that experience again for some time, I warrant you!’ ” (FFMC 117), so that her last chance to escape the stigma of being “fallen” is gone. The chapter prepares for the failure of Troy’s eventual marriage to Bathsheba in two ways. Most obviously it sets up the melodramatic confrontation over Fanny that will explosively break them apart, but more subtly it illustrates the fragility of his Lothario persona, which is based on a performativity that cannot bear sustained personal or social scrutiny. If, therefore, “[t]he new masculine hero of a materialistic age was supposed to seek worldly success,”45 Hardy’s connection of Troy to a melodramatic figure whose definition of success is seduction, and whose final position is an emasculated (in this cultural discourse) attachment to a woman who is required to support him, means that the novel exposes as insufficient not only the character but also the superseded mechanism of power he represents. Troy’s failure is more than personal, so that while the spectacle of his glamor may, for a time, “enable him to hide the fact that he lives most comfortably as a parasite,”46 Bathsheba’s harsh lesson in this truth moves her toward the disciplinary regime that supplants him. Hardy’s method for representing this movement is to employ the kind of parallel plots that we have already seen him use. The description of Gabriel’s efforts to save the farm’s uncovered, harvested hay ricks from the thunderstorm that threatens to ruin them is, as the Westminster reviewer noted, a sensational mirroring of the earlier scene in which he saved a similar set of Bathsheba’s ricks from fire. As well, the harvest-supper and its aftermath echo the sheep-shearing scene and the shearing-supper that followed it. The shared setting of the Great Barn links these events, but the difference is that while the shearing was only partially disrupted by Boldwood’s intervention as a suitor to Bathsheba, the harvest-supper turns into a drunken shambles due to Troy’s insistence that his status as her husband be publicly acknowledged. “Friends it is not only the Harvest Home that we are celebrating to-night; but this is also a Wedding Feast. A short time ago I had the happiness to lead to the altar this lady your mistress, and not until now have we been able to give any public flourish to the event in Weatherbury. That it may be thoroughly well done and that every man may go happy to bed, I have ordered to be brought here some bottles of brandy and kettles of hot water. A treble-strong goblet will be handed round to each guest.” (FFMC 238)
Although we have been told before this that Troy is “ruling now in the room of his wife” (FFMC 236), he in fact must beg her for any money he wishes
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to spend, and this blatant attempt to confirm his position as master of the farm’s “mistress” reveals an insecurity that is only reinforced when, overriding her plea that the workmen not be given liquor they cannot handle, he insists that all the women leave so that “ ‘we cockbirds [can] have a jolly carouse to ourselves’ ” (FFMC 238). Troy’s attempt to reestablish himself as a “cockbird” badly misfires, since in the end it exposes him as flaccid and inadequate. Gabriel, having slipped away after only one drink, and being certain now that the pending storm will destroy the crop unless it is protected, returns to the barn to seek help, and when he looks in “an unusual picture met his eye” (FFMC 240). The candles suspended among the evergreens had burnt down to their sockets, and in some cases the leaves tied about them were scorched. Many of the lights had quite gone out, others smoked and stunk, grease dropping from them upon the floor. Here, under the table, and leaning against forms and chairs in every conceivable attitude except the perpendicular, were the wretched persons of all the workfolk, the hair of their heads at such low levels being suggestive of mops and brooms. In the midst of these shone red and distinct the figure of Sergeant Troy, leaning back in a chair. (FFMC 240)
The active male workers of the shearing scene are reduced to unconscious prostrate bodies subject to Gabriel’s supervisory surveillance, so that the Great Barn, “originally a symbol of the integrity of the community, becomes the symbol of its degeneration once Troy is master of the farm.”47 Almost as important, however, is that Troy’s senseless body is subjected to that same process of surveillance. He is at the center of the grotesque spectacle he has created, but far from a role that enhances his glamor he has produced one that debases him and makes him vulnerable to a competing male gaze he is increasingly powerless to withstand. Further, he is now displayed as the object of a female gaze in a way very different than before, for when Oak returns to check if the situation has changed, “[h]e felt a zephyr curling about his cheek, and turned. It was Bathsheba’s breath: she had followed him, and was looking into the same chink” (FFMC 248). Troy does not know it, but this marks a turning point in his fortune; stripped of his melodramatic allure he has nothing left with which to dazzle Bathsheba’s eyes, so that her vision of him will increasingly align itself with Oak’s, whose rise begins precisely at this initiating moment of Troy’s descent. Troy’s subsequent heartless comment to his wife that “ ‘All romances end at marriage’ ” (FFMC 265) is characteristically imperceptive, since he does not recognize that without theatrically caddish “romance” his influence is fatally reduced. The description of Gabriel and Bathsheba battling the elements to save the grain thus illustrates both the
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beginning of her movement back toward him and the growing influence of his disciplinary mode of perception. Storms, like fires, were common backdrops to stage sensation scenes, and if anything Victorian theaters were more advanced in creating this type of illusion than the other, since the long tradition of producing storms in Macbeth, King Lear and The Tempest had evolved both the lighting and sound effects required. Hardy’s description of the approach and wild climax of the thunderstorm suggests his personal experience of such weather, just as his description of the rick fire suggests direct knowledge of that kind of event, and his ability to vividly evoke the exposure and danger of his two main characters as they are almost struck by lightning provides another remarkable set piece. But the key difference between the two scenes is the isolation of Bathsheba and Oak in their efforts to prevent disaster. If the spectacle of the earlier chapter used melodrama to suggest communal engagement and the stability of assigned status, this chapter does the exact opposite. As already noted, Troy’s destructive influence has neutralized the community by incapacitating the men and alienating the women, so that this threat can only be met by the individual, isolated initiative of those vigilant enough to recognize the storm’s economic implications. Indeed, Gabriel’s ability to “read” the natural world by closely observing the behavior of toads, slugs, spiders, and sheep, so that he can predict the coming gale, is a kind of foundational surveillance that places even the nonhuman under his intense scrutiny. His subsequent, famously unArcadian “simple calculation” determining what is at stake if the ricks are not covered, 5 × 30 = 150 quarters = 500£ 3 × 40 = 120 quarters = _____ 250£ Total 750£ (FFMC 240)
reveals a commitment to the profit motive at odds with the pastoral skills just demonstrated, and whatever role he is playing it is manifestly not that of shepherd. The iconic crook from the rick fire scene is nowhere in evidence, and the intimacy established as he and Bathsheba work alone to cover the grain is a far cry from her looking down on him from her pony while being addressed as “ma’am” in sight of the entire workforce of Little Weatherbury Farm. Beegel notes the “sexual dimension”48 of Oak being able to “feel Bathsheba’s warm arm tremble in his hand—a sensation novel and thrilling enough” (FFMC 246) while hearing “her rhythmical pants” (FFMC 247) after their close escape from the lightning strike, so that the status barriers between them are broken down by their commitment to saving the farm’s capital and the intense sensations they share
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while doing so. Further, as a direct result of Boldwood’s failure to protect his own crop from the same heavy rain, he sends for Oak and “proposed at the interview that Gabriel should take the superintendence of the Lower Farm . . . because of the necessity Boldwood felt for such aid, and the impossibility of discovering a more trustworthy man. Gabriel’s malignant star was assuredly setting fast” (FFMC 322–323). The failure of Troy and Boldwood’s melodramatic excess has prepared the way for the man whose ability to “look over” both them and their property demonstrates how discipline “makes possible the operation of a relational power that sustains itself by its own mechanism and which, for the spectacle of public events, substitutes the uninterrupted play of calculated gazes.”49 They have instigated the process of their own replacement. Fittingly, therefore, the catalyst that initiates the novel’s final movement, and that eventually expels them from the text, is a character whose potential for melodrama Hardy fully recognizes. But because this employment of the melodramatic mode is centered on a female figure its impact is radically different, as we shall see again when it is applied to Bathsheba. There can be no doubt that the element of Far from the Madding Crowd that caused the most worry for Leslie Stephen as he guided it through its serialization was the text’s presentation of Fanny Robin, the result being, as Morgan observes, “the most extensive bowdlerizations of Hardy’s novel.”50 Fanny’s early appearances—revealing her destitution by accepting a shilling from Oak, standing outside the barracks begging Troy to fulfill his promise to marry her, mistaking the church and being rejected by him at their putative wedding—all suggest a sympathy for the fallen woman that exacerbates the already risky fact of such a person being in the plot at all. Hardy’s portrayal of her eventual fate, however, pushes the reader toward an emotional identification through sensationalism clearly intended to break down Victorian responses toward the sexually transgressive woman. The chapter “On Casterbridge Highway” (FFMC 258–263) describing Fanny’s desperate efforts to drag her failing body, far advanced in pregnancy with Troy’s child, the three miles to the Casterbridge workhouse is doubly sensational. Hardy’s insistence that his audience not only confront this scandalous and improper situation but also on some level experience it with Fanny through his intense evocation of her suffering creates precisely the materialized, affective evidence of her vulnerability and exploitation that drives sensation fiction’s social critique. Hardy’s addition of the mysterious dog that aids her in the “last desperate eight hundred yards” (FFMC 261) is an overt signal of his nonrealist intent, and the final harsh irony of this animal, the only creature to show Fanny any compassion, being “stoned . . . away” (FFMC 263) by the workhouse attendant provides a fittingly bitter conclusion to this scene of painful abandonment.
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Goode argues that this is “an angry and perceptive piece of writing,”51 and Shires agrees by declaring “this scene carries an impact well beyond pity and irony. The scene evokes anger.”52 Both critics also, however, feel the need to distance the presentation of Fanny’s distress from melodrama, with Goode flatly declaring it is “neither melodramatic nor incidental” and Shires more conditionally conceding that “[t]he scene is so overwritten . . . that it calls attention to itself as almost melodramatic.”53 In each case the implication is that melodrama provides an inadequate form to convey Hardy’s deep disgust for status quo attitudes, but this does not give the melodramatic mode enough credit. Scenes of harsh physical endurance by (often lower class) women were not uncommon in nineteenth-century stage melodrama, and their aim was to produce an angry repudiation of the social conditions responsible, the same goal achieved by this chapter. Hardy’s fusion of sensationalism and melodrama here provides an almost archetypal example of how sensation fiction works to embody abstract issues of female oppression in order to generate an emotive response, and although Cvetkovich rightly notes that “[o]nce affect and femininity are linked, a certain kind of cultural work has already been done,”54 the text’s aggressive insistence on empathy for Fanny as an unwed mother is sufficiently challenging that it mitigates the problematic spectacle of her mistreatment and death. Hardy’s use of melodrama in conjunction with his female characters is therefore quantitatively different than how he uses his male characters. Boldwood and Troy’s melodramatic excessiveness are meant to alienate them from the reader, while Fanny’s melodramatic victimization causes that same reader to identify with her. This is important because something very similar happens with Bathsheba. Her association with melodramatic affect is presented as a necessary stage through which she must pass in order to escape the melodramas of the two men attempting to control her through their own egotistical self-dramatizations, and once she has achieved this she is prepared for Oak’s less solipsistic vision. While Fanny Robin invokes important issues in the novel, at this point in his career Hardy is not prepared to make a fallen woman his central female character; that would have to wait for the depiction of Tess Durbeyfield’s life and death. Nonetheless, Bathsheba’s viewing of the corpses of Fanny and her stillborn baby, and the devastating exchange with Troy it provokes, provides yet another example of gazing at bodies that is fraught with significance. This scene also receives a dramatic illustration by Paterson (see Figure 2), and although the bodies are not shown in the picture, their coffin so dominates the drawing that it certainly calls attention to their presence. Hardy’s lengthy manuscript description of the dead mother and her child, which he expunged for the Cornhill serialization at Stephen’s request,
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Figure 2 Her tears fell fast beside the unconscious pair.
is powerfully sensational, in that it oversteps the boundaries of what could properly be presented in Victorian fiction while emphasizing the physicality of both figures. Thus the baby is described as having “a face so delicately small in contour and substance that its cheeks and the plump backs of its little fists irresistibly reminded [Bathsheba], excited as she was, of the soft convexity of mushrooms on a dewy morning,” while the “youth and fairness of both the silent ones withdrew from the scene all associations of a repulsive kind . . . [t]hey struck upon the sense in the aspect of incipiency, not in that of decadence. They seemed failures in creation, by nature interesting, rather than instances of dissolution, by nature frightful” (FFMC 289).55 Like the presentation of Fanny’s grim journey to the workhouse, this sensual depiction is meant to preclude any intellectual distancing by the reader, while the narrator’s overt intrusion insists that neither the mother nor her “bastard” deserves the automatic ideological rejection supposedly required by Victorian culture. Gatrell observes that “the passage is characteristic of Hardy’s lofty style as it crops up throughout the novel,” and like many critics who prefer a more restrained literary mode, he goes on to say “[i]t is bad enough, but Stephen might as well have objected to the whole novel,”56 thus (rather grudgingly) confirming Hardy’s use of sensational and melodramatic effects as a systemic part of his style.
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At the sight and sound of that, to her, unendurable act, Bathsheba sprang towards him. All the feeling which had been scattered over her existence since she knew what feeling was seemed gathered together into one pulsation now . . . She flung her arms round Troy’s neck, exclaiming wildly from the deepest deep of her heart: — “Don’t—don’t kiss them! O Frank, I can’t bear it—I can’t! I love you better than she did—kiss me too, Frank—kiss me!—You will Frank kiss me too!” (FFMC 292)
Bathsheba’s abjection appears complete at this point, and her suffering is emphasized even further when, after Troy says of Fanny that “ ‘in the sight of heaven . . . [she is his] very very wife’ ” (FFMC 293) her response is “a low cry of despair and indignation—such a wail of anguish as had never before been heard within those old-inhabited walls” (FFMC 293). Yet it is possible to argue that what is going on here is more than “Fanny’s Revenge,” although that is the title of the chapter. In her provocative article “ ‘Mimic Sorrows’: Masochism and the Gendering of Pain in Victorian Melodrama,” Ellen Bayuk Rosenman argues that “melodramatic suffering is anything but simple. Often taken for passivity, it can be a potent, if encoded, form of agency,”57 and this formulation provides interesting interpretive possibilities for this scene. It is just as well to remember that, on a very basic level, Bathsheba has staged this tableau, and has therefore willfully arranged the masochistic humiliation that results. She chooses to open the coffin in order to “ ‘know the worst’ ” (FFMC 288), and although she cannot know when Troy will return or how he will react, she certainly lingers long enough to make their conflict more likely than if she had immediately left the sitting room upon making her discovery. In this context Rosenman’s additional comments are useful. Although masochism is commonly understood as a perversion in which the subject takes pleasure from pain, literary and theoretical treatments have tended to understand it as an acting-out of suffering to achieve some socially-censured end . . . In this sense, masochism . . . is a performance staged by the sufferer, designed to convince an audience that the sufferer deserves sympathy, however deeply he or she has sinned.58
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Once Troy enters the scene we get a full-blown melodramatic tableau, skillfully rendered by Paterson’s illustration, which leads to the final breakdown of Bathsheba’s relationship with him. From one perspective Bathsheba is completely humiliated here, and no more so than after Troy bends down and gently kisses Fanny.
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Hardy’s structuring of Bathsheba’s suffering as she gazes at the exposed body of her dead rival and her baby acts as a type of melodramatic compensation for her earlier transgressive behavior. Through this confrontation she “atones” for her culturally reprobated rejection of Oak, unbalancing of Boldwood, and imprudent marriage to Troy, even as she maintains her status within the text as its heroine. Melodrama allows Hardy to generate sympathy for both the sexually fallen woman and the culturally improper woman through the creation of an affective response that short-circuits his audience’s ideologically conditioned reacting by evoking a realm of excess in which such “normal” feelings are inadequate. Further, Bathsheba’s usurping of Troy’s melodramatic mode undercuts his claim to always be the center of attention, thus further edging him toward irrelevancy. For the last part of the novel she becomes an example “of what Michelle Massé calls ‘bravura performance’ of the masochistic heroine: ‘By presenting herself as a spectacle, she asserts that she has always/ already paid enough.’ ”59 Bathsheba’s night spent near “a species of swamp” (FFMC 296) after she flees from the encounter with her husband has attracted significant critical commentary, but her recuperation afterward is less often discussed. As she and Liddy wander through the wood waiting for the coffin to be removed, Bathsheba constructs a self-dramatization that helps reestablish her sense of self-worth through an acceptance of sensationalized suffering. Rather than follow through on her original idea to escape her failed marriage, she delivers this speech to her maidservant. “No—I’ve altered my mind. It is only women with no pride in them who run away from their husbands. There is one position worse than that of being found dead in your husband’s house from his ill-usage, and that is to be found alive through having gone away to the house of somebody else . . . A runaway wife is an encumbrance to everybody; a burden to herself, and a byword—all of which make up a heap of misery greater than any that comes by staying at home, though this may include the trifling items of insult, beating and starvation. Liddy if ever you marry—God forbid that you ever should—you’ll find yourself in a fearful situation; but mind this, don’t you flinch. Stand your ground and be cut to pieces. That’s what I’m going to do.” (FFMC 299)
Hardy at least partially undercuts this ringing declaration by having the two women barricade themselves into the attic only to quickly become bored when Troy “did not appear in the neighbourhood or trouble them at all” (FFMC 300), but the emotional pain Bathsheba is feeling is real, and her melodramatic expression of willingness to bear it reveals a masochistic acceptance of her female fate. This both plays into and subverts Victorian
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expectations, because “the glib association between femininity, weakness, and suffering makes masochism a particularly effective disguise for power: if women’s pain appears to be natural, if it appears to conform to gender norms, it can smuggle its contraband desires unnoticed. Through melodramatic suffering, women assert themselves through the very emotions that seem to signify their lack of power.”60 Bathsheba’s intense performance of the role of wronged wife distracts the reader from the sexual gratification she has desired, pursued, and received from Troy, while at the same time her refusal to accept that he is dead after his apparent drowning acts as a barrier empowering her to stave off Boldwood’s renewed and still unwelcome advances. In both social and erotic terms Hardy’s movement of Bathsheba into the melodramatic mode serves to covertly justify her claims of agency, and resistance to coercion, by depicting a self-willed distress that precludes any need for additional textual punishment. Unsurprisingly, however, when the three forms of melodramatic excess now established are brought into sudden and unexpected conjunction the result is explosive, and results in the kind of ambivalent narrative closure typical in sensation fiction. In what can only be read as a sly nod toward the tropes that have played such an important part in this novel, upon Troy’s return to England after his rescue from the dangerous currents of Lulwind Cove and following his time in America, Hardy actually has him play in “The Royal Hippodrome Performance of Turpin’s Ride to York and the Death of Black Bess” (FFMC 329). This popular entertainment combined horsemanship with melodrama, and culminated in “the body of the gallant and faithful Bess . . . [being] carried out on a shutter by twelve volunteers from among the spectators” (FFMC 334). That this example of an equine body exposed to the gaze of all spectators is a piece of self-satire on the author’s part is probably doubtful, but what is not doubtful is that placing Troy in this situation finally and fully denudes him of the heroic façade he has worked so hard to create. Reduced to “peeping . . . through a slit” at his wife “on high . . . sitting as queen of the tournament” (FFMC 333) Troy’s formerly potent gaze and assured self-spectacle are gone as he does everything possible not to be recognized in this performance, driven by a “sense of shame” (FFMC 333) at his loss of status and the fear that he “would be nicknamed ‘Turpin’ as long as he lived” (FFMC 337). Nonetheless, he is now inescapably defined by his melodramatic mode, and his method of reappearing in his wife’s life is therefore completely consistent. Brooks notes that a standard part of melodrama’s pattern is “the topos of the interrupted fête, the violated banquet,”61 which nicely describes what happens when Troy attempts to reclaim Bathsheba at Boldwood’s Christmas party, so that “by the melodramatic timing of his final entrance he brings about
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his own death.”62 Morgan’s observation that Troy’s intrusion and murder by Boldwood is presented as an “oddly surrealistic sequence . . . a kind of masquerade of death in which all events and characters take on an unreal quality”63 reinforces Hardy’s use of antirealism here, and Boldwood’s subsequent attempted suicide caps a lurid turn of events fit for the pages of any of the period’s sensation novels. But what follows this flurry of violence is almost equally startling. In a scene sensationally reproducing the one with Gabriel at the start of Far from the Madding Crowd, Bathsheba is revealed “sitting on the floor beside the body of Troy, his head pillowed in her lap where she herself had lifted it” (FFMC 368), and the narrator goes on to inform us that “Troy recumbent in his wife’s lap formed now the sole spectacle in the middle of the spacious room” (FFMC 369). Garson sees this as a type of disempowerment, turning Bathsheba “into a moral emblem” by showing her “[h]olding the dying Troy in her arms in a pieta posture,” which in turn “render[s] Bathsheba, as a body, invisible” through its submersion of her individuality into an “idealized” female figure.64 I would argue, however, that the novel’s next events undercut this position. Although for the moment Troy is the “sole spectacle” in the room, this is quickly altered. The “astonishing information” that Bathsheba has appropriated his cadaver because she “ ‘wouldn’t let her dear husband’s corpse bide neglected for folks to stare at’ ” (FFMC 370) provides the text’s final example of gender inversion centered on an exposed body. Using her authority to remove Troy from the gaze of others, Bathsheba claims the right to determine who is given the power to look, how they will be allowed to look, and what they will be allowed to look at, as shown when the surgeon, the parson, and Gabriel arrive at her farmhouse. Looking into the chamber of death [Bathsheba] had vacated they saw by the light of the candles which were on the drawers a tall straight shape lying at the further end of the bedroom, wrapped in white. Everything around was quite orderly. The doctor went in, and after a few minutes returned to the landing again, where Oak and the parson still waited. “It is all done indeed, as she says,” remarked Mr Aldritch, in a subdued voice. “The body has been undressed and properly laid out in graveclothes. Gracious Heaven—this mere girl! She must have the nerve of a stoic!” “The heart of a wife merely,” floated in a whisper about the ears of the three, and turning they saw Bathsheba in the midst of them. Then . . . at that instant . . . she silently sank down between them. (FFMC 371)
Bathsheba’s reclaiming of the title of wife here is a direct echo of her exchange with Troy over the body of Fanny, only now as the active agent she
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cannot be denied her status. Troy’s reduction to a “tall straight shape” at the “further end of the bedroom” illustrates the transformation of his phallic sexual energy into the impotence of death, a rigidity that now symbolizes his disempowerment rather than his virility. Like Oak lying unconscious in Bathsheba’s lap, this scene acts to counter an earlier one in which she was victimized by the masculine ability to categorize and define female identity through either acceptance or rejection. And her melodramatic collapse, which might appear to suggest weakness, can also be viewed as a way of reclaiming her central place in the sensational events that have just occurred. Bathsheba, having demonstrated her power to display the body of her husband as she sees fit, now draws attention away from his body to hers, finally and completely marginalizing Troy in a way that has been unavailable to her since their first encounter in the fir plantation. Her fainting fit is therefore categorically different from Cytherea Graye’s in Desperate Remedies since, unlike Cytherea, instead of being essentially ignored by the men fighting for dominance over her prostrate form Bathsheba’s faint makes her the center of attention. Despite her self-blame for what has occurred, revealed in her broken cries of “ ‘O it is my fault . . . how can I live! O God, how can I live!’ ” (FFMC 371), once again Hardy reinforces the affective identification of the reader with Bathsheba through her suffering, because “[i]n these cases, suffering normalizes behavior that challenges ideology, winning acceptance—and favourable verdicts—for the sufferer.”65 Having ensured that his unconventional heroine remains sympathetic to the end, the author can now move toward a closure that confirms the cultural significance of the melodrama and sensationalism that have driven his plot. During all the events leading up the novel’s climactic moment of violence, and indeed fully dependent in some ways upon those events, occurs what the title of Chapter XLIX laconically describes as “Oak’s Advancement” (FFMC 322). I have already noted how Boldwood’s loss of interest in his farming responsibilities leads to Gabriel’s superintendence of his agricultural business, and Troy’s disappearance leads to the same outcome with Bathsheba, for “one excellent result of her general apathy was the longdelayed installation of Oak as bailiff ” with a “substantial increase of wages” (FFMC 322). Even more significant is that Gabriel, “though paid a fixed wage by Bathsheba . . . had made an arrangement with Boldwood by which Oak was to receive a share of the receipts—a small share certainly, yet it was money of a higher quality than mere wages, and capable of expansion in a way that wages were not,” the result of his rise to the position of capitalist shareholder being “we now see Oak mounted on a strong cob, and daily trotting the length and breadth of about two thousand acres in a cheerful
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spirit of surveillance, as if the crops all belonged to him” (FFMC 323). Of course for my purposes it is the overt use of the word “surveillance” here that is most revealing, but its appearance should not come as a surprise, since much earlier in the book we have been told that Bathsheba’s inspection of her property has “almost constantly” been preceded by Gabriel, who has “been watching her affairs as carefully as any specially appointed officer of surveillance could have done” (FFMC 160). The pun on the word “affairs” here is almost too overt, because up to this point Oak has been observing her affair with Boldwoood, and immediately after this he will find himself observing her affair with Troy. Further, although the narrator’s comment that “watching is best done invisibly” (FFMC 160) is ostensibly provided to explain Bathsheba’s use of a dark lantern during her inspections, its symbolic applicability to Gabriel is even more apt, in that his elimination as an object of desire for much of the novel renders him a fittingly indiscernible “officer of surveillance” of the sexual melodrama from which he remains aloof. As Foucault asserts, “[d]isciplinary power . . . is exercised through its invisibility; at the same time it imposes on those whom it subjects a principle of compulsory visibility . . . It is the fact of being constantly seen, of being able always to be seen, that maintains the disciplined individual in his subjection.”66 Bathsheba has been under Oak’s constant implicit surveillance, and with the destruction of the two men who made spectacles of themselves through their excesses the resistance to disciplinary power they provided her is gone. Indeed, Bathsheba is not the only one now to fall into the regimes of discipline the text presents as ascendant. Boldwood, after his attempt to shoot himself following Troy’s murder is thwarted by one of his servants, declares “ ‘Well, it makes no difference . . . There is another way for me to die’ ” (FFMC 367), before calmly walking to Casterbridge gaol and surrendering himself to justice. He will not, however, be provided with the hanging he so clearly craves. A “few merciful men” provide evidence “which it was hoped might remove the crime . . . out of the category of wilful murder, and lead it to be regarded as a sheer outcome of madness” (FFMC 374), so that the court’s final sentence is “confinement during her Majesty’s pleasure” (FFMC 375). Jan Coggan’s response of “ ‘Hurrah! . . . God’s above the devil yet’ ” (FFMC 375) is understandable, but is perhaps not a sentiment shared by Boldwood himself. Incarcerated for the rest of his life and subjected to the panopticism of the prison madhouse, he is denied becoming the one public spectacle he finally desired, suggesting the movement toward a new cultural paradigm in which “[t]he expiation that once rained down upon the body must be replaced by a punishment that acts in depth on the heart, the thoughts, the will, the inclinations . . . The old
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partners of the spectacle of punishment, the body and the blood [give] way . . . The apparatus of punitive justice must now bite into this bodiless reality.”67 Troy’s death and Boldwood’s incarceration signal a movement away from the externalized theatrics of embodied melodrama, and toward the internalized acceptance of psychologically disciplined control, a movement that is represented in the relationship of the remaining two main characters. The closure of Far from the Madding Crowd, which provides the “proper” marriage of Bathsheba and Gabriel, is clarified through its congruencies with the conclusions of such famous sensation novels as The Woman in White, Lady Audley’s Secret, and Aurora Floyd. In them, as in Hardy’s text, the plot ends with the establishment of a socially sanctioned domestic relationship through either the expulsion or the “taming” of an improper female presence. Also like them, however, the sensational and melodramatic events that precede that ending call into question domesticity’s ability to contain the violent emotions exposed. The conflict between sensational surveillance and melodramatic spectacle presented by Hardy thus provides a deep structure reading that supplements the gender issues raised. Shires is right to argue that the “marriage of Bathsheba and Oak . . . cannot be interpreted merely as a recuperation of Bathsheba into a patriarchal prison-house,”68 not least because the implied “prison-house” encompasses both men and women. Bathsheba’s intense and in some ways coerced engagement with the melodramatic mode has in the end exorcised its influence, so that her desire for the “ ‘most private, secret, plainest wedding that is possible’ ” (FFMC 385), because she “ ‘has a great wish that all the parish shall not be in Church looking at her’ ” (FFMC 386), indicates an evolution away from the spectacular toward the disciplined, a process that Oak has already undergone through his harsh fluctuations in status. It is telling, however, that this attempt to avoid the cultural gaze is not really successful, in that Mark Clark and Jan Coggan arrange a loud public celebration of their nuptials that calls the newlyweds out onto the porch just as “[t]he two sat down very quietly to tea in Bathsheba’s parlour” (FFMC 388). Gabriel’s response to this insistence that he show himself in his new role of husband is laughter, while “Bathsheba smiled, for she never laughed readily now” (FFMC 389), and although this suggests that she has paid a higher price for the “happy ending,” both of them are reminded that attempting to keep private even the most personal ceremony will fail. That these men are Oak and Bathsheba’s social inferiors is irrelevant, because the kind of disciplinary power revealed is exercised rather than possessed; it is not the “privilege,” acquired or preserved, of the dominant class, but the overall effect of its strategic
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As Gabriel and Bathsheba begin what will obviously be a very nonmelodramatic life together, they stand for a new version of social relations, symbolizing the progression away from an older model of interaction. If, as Hadley argues, “the melodramatic mode in its various manifestations . . . thoroughly idealized a passing deferential society and the status hierarchies such a society nurtured,”70 then that mode’s association with the landowner Boldwood and the soldier Troy makes perfect sense. Their replacement by the socially mobile and panoptic Oak, who wins both their wealth and the woman they pursued, reinforces the text’s recognition that increasingly “society is one not of spectacle, but of surveillance,” and that “it is not that the beautiful totality of the individual is amputated, repressed, altered by [the] social order, it is rather that the individual is carefully fabricated in it, according to a whole technique of forces and bodies.”71 Bathsheba and Gabriel have not discovered a more disciplined approach to life; they have become aligned with a disciplinary force that shapes their desires to ensure a more productive engagement with new materialist realities, so that they are “situated in a certain political economy of the body”72 that, while it means they can look forward to a successful union, carries its own price in docile conformity. Hardy’s ambivalence toward this cultural shift is evident in the ambiguity of the novel’s conclusion, since the transition leading to its nominally positive resolution can only be achieved through death and madness. Weatherbury society returns to stability, but it is a different kind of stability, since the originally deracinated couple that have now sunk roots into its world represent a perspective that harbingers more alterations to come. Far from the Madding Crowd employs a dialectic of sensationalism and melodrama, of surveillance and spectacle, to explore an ideological movement whose emphasis on inner self-constraint is most readily observed through changing attitudes toward the body, and Hardy’s focus on exposed and vulnerable bodies in this text questions his Victorian audience’s sense of cultural security. The pastoral trappings that so attracted his original readers act as camouflage for the novel’s examination of a radical rearrangement in the machinery of power, while the sensation fiction elements actually driving its plot serve, as they often do in this genre, to demonstrate the supplanting of older forms of authority.
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positions—an effect that is manifested and sometimes extended by the position of those who are dominated. Furthermore, this power is not exercised simply as an obligation or a prohibition on those who “do not have it”; it invests them, is transmitted by them and through them; it exerts pressure upon them . . . This means that these relations go right down into the depths of society.69
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When next Hardy turned to a similar exploration he would leave behind the rustic world of hayricks, great barns, and shearing suppers, with the result that A Laodicean would never come close to matching the popularity of Far from the Madding Crowd. But Paula Power is, like Aurora Floyd, a sister in sensation to Bathsheba Everdene, and they are linked despite the different backdrops to their melodramatic experiences.
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“ ‘A mixed young lady, rather’ ”: Melodrama, Technology, and Dis/Embodied Sensation in A Laodicean
A
s with Desperate Remedies, A Laodicean comes ready-made with a biographical anecdote that has proven useful for critics to explain (away) its melodrama and sensationalism. In his 1896 Preface Hardy observes that “[t]he writing of the tale was rendered memorable to two persons, at least, by a tedious illness of five months that laid hold of the author soon after the story was begun in a well-known magazine; during which period the narrative had to be strenuously continued by dictation to a predetermined cheerful ending.”1 This brief description is then expanded upon considerably in the Life. Hardy [was] feeling by this time very unwell . . . On the Sunday after he was worse, and seeing the name of a surgeon on a brass plate opposite his house, sent for him. The surgeon came at once, and . . . said that Hardy was bleeding internally. Mrs. Hardy, in her distress, called on their neighbours the Macmillans, to ask their opinion, and they immediately sent their own doctor. He agreed about the bleeding, said the case was serious; and that the patient was not to get up on any account . . . Now he had already written the early chapters of a story for Harper’s Magazine—A Laodicean, which was to begin in the (nominally) December number, issued in November. This first part was already printed, and du Maurier was illustrating it. The story had to go on somehow, it happening, unfortunately, that the number containing it was the first number also of the publication of Harper’s as an English and not exclusively American magazine as hitherto, and the success of its launch in London depending largely upon the serial tale. Its writer was, during the first
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few weeks, in considerable pain, and compelled to lie on an inclined plane with the lower part of his body higher than his head. Yet he felt determined to finish the novel, at whatever stress to himself—so as not to ruin the new venture of the publishers, and also in the interests of his wife, for whom as yet he had made but a poor provision in the event of his own decease. Accordingly from November onwards he began dictating it to her from the awkward position he occupied; and continued to do so—with greater ease as the pain and hæmorrhage went off. She worked bravely both at writing and nursing, till at the beginning of the following May a rough draft was finished by one shift and another.2
Here Hardy may be seen asserting his professionalism, by fulfilling a contract despite an extremely difficult situation, as well as suggesting the solid novelistic reputation he has now achieved, which is expected to carry the launch of a “well-known” magazine into an expanded market. He is also giving credit where credit is due by acknowledging the essential role played by Emma Hardy in completing the novel’s serialization, even if he did later destroy the manuscript because it was written mostly in her hand. What is nowhere to be seen is Hardy using his illness as an excuse for his story’s supposed flaws: that would be a task for later generations of commentators. Thus Jane Gatewood notes “[a]s critics began to discuss A Laodicean in light of their knowledge of the unusual circumstances of its composition, they saw the book as breaking into two distinct sections: the opening one-third, representing the success, Hardy’s attempt to write a comedy of ideas, and the last two-thirds, representing the failure, his surrender to melodrama when illness forced him to abandon his original plan.”3 It is now difficult to establish exactly when this critical trope first took hold, but one solid candidate (or culprit) for its broader dissemination is Arthur McDowall in his 1931 monograph Thomas Hardy: A Critical Study. McDowall’s “Author’s Note,” published only three years after Hardy’s death, and written while the original two volumes of the Life were put into print in 1928 and 1930, explicitly recognizes its influence by stating that “[n]ew light of unique value on the mind and art of Thomas Hardy has been thrown by his own reflections contained in the biography written by his wife, and my best thanks are due to Mrs. [Florence] Hardy for permission to quote from it.”4 But when it came to discussing A Laodicean it was manifestly not Hardy’s “own reflections” that shaped his reaction to the text. Instead, McDowall provides a series of observations that foreshadow/establish the arguments that identify the novel as disappointingly and irrevocably substandard. Melodrama, which had played so large a part in the first of his stories, was a resource that Hardy was late in discarding. It was always, perhaps, the line
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of least resistance. It destroys A Laodicean and, having little pretext from the real basis of the story, leaves it the weakest of all the novels and a failure with little of the wonted compensation . . . We know, a little more than we did, under what harassing strain he wrote it—the curse of the serial in its most aggravating form, for he was overtaken with a painful illness when the story had begun coming out in a magazine, and it had to be “strenuously continued by dictation to a predetermined cheerful ending” . . . Yet it was not the cheerful end which upset A Laodicean, but the intrigue which gradually takes the novel in its grasp and strangles good material.5
McDowall’s apparent ability to distinguish the “real basis” of the plot and its “good material” from the “intrigue” that in fact comprises most of the text is manifestly predicated on the assumption that melodrama, as an unfortunately not-yet-discarded “line of least resistance,” can only act as a textual contaminant. This would have been a critical truism by 1931, so Hardy’s illness becomes a convenient scapegoat for the uncomfortable fact that a novel of his middle period is dominated by the melodramatic mode. Not all analysts of A Laodicean, however, are willing to accept as a mitigating circumstance the author’s sickness. Howe, in what by this point should be a familiarly wrongheaded but usefully revealing declaration, asserts that “it would be foolish to deny that Hardy’s illness disabled him, but it is also worth noting that the trash he fell back upon was precisely of the kind he had used in earlier novels like Desperate Remedies and The Hand of Ethelberta.”6 Like McDowall, Howe can only see the novel’s obvious status as a piece of sensation fiction as a betrayal, and his efforts to cordon off sensationalism and melodrama by restricting their employment to the other Novels of Ingenuity, and ignoring the significant role they play in Far from the Madding Crowd and The Return of the Native (both also “earlier novels”), demonstrates the tendentious nature of his evaluation. Even such a sympathetic reader as Taylor, although he is more willing to acknowledge sensational elements in the “major” works, cannot resist falling into the customary critical pattern by insisting that A Laodicean’s “main faults are the long sequence of melodramatic intrigue, during which Hardy seems to lose sight of his original purpose, and the mixture of modes in which the story is written, and both derive from the circumstances of composition. Clearly Hardy did not originally intend a conscious reversion to the techniques of Desperate Remedies.”7 But mixing apparently contradictory modalities is, as has already been noted, a standard method of the sensation novel, and the desire to separate out the first third of A Laodicean from the rest of the novel is extremely problematic given that throughout the Victorian period “we are confronted with numerous joinings of melodramatic and realistic forms and functions. So, we make a categorical
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and historical mistake when we attempt to fix their identities (as if each had a controlling genetic code).”8 I would argue, therefore, that it is far from clear that Hardy did not “intend” to write such a text, or that in doing so he lost “sight of his original purpose.” Indeed, sensational elements are in place from the start. George Somerset’s early clandestine observance of Paula Power’s refusal of adult baptism is a sensation scene, and Paula’s intense relationship with her companion Charlotte de Stancy, in which “they are more like lovers than girl and girl,”9 invokes the sensational secret of same-sex desire we have already seen in both Desperate Remedies and The Mayor of Casterbridge. The story’s uncanny and melodramatic villain, William Dare, is introduced in Chapter VI and commits his first, but not last, act of theft and fraud in Chapter XII, while Somerset and Paula’s narrow avoidance of death by an onrushing locomotive occurs in that same chapter, invoking a by-this-time stock device from melodrama. All of this occurs in the section of text that Hardy had completed writing, and that had been set in type, before he was forced into bed rest and dictation, suggesting that this aspect of the novel was at least as well established as the ostensibly more legitimate novel of ideas soon to be “strangled” by a putative lapse into over-elaborate plotting. Fisher, therefore, is correct in his more recent assertion that “the influence of the illness has been overestimated and misused,” and he points the way forward in discussions of A Laodicean by insisting “any idea either that Hardy chose his subject matter through desperation . . . is wrong,”10 an insistence supported by the manifest connections between this “weakest of all the novels” and Far from the Madding Crowd. While in chronological and cultural terms the two narratives appear to inhabit completely different textual spaces, with A Laodicean’s subtitle, “A Story of To-Day,” presaging its incorporation of telegraphy, photography, and railroad tourism into its various plots, in contrast to Far from the Madding Crowd’s quasi-nostalgic evocation of Great Barns and shearing suppers, the novels share devices, themes, and to a certain extent character types. Most obviously, both Bathsheba and Paula inherit significant wealth and property from a male relative, an event that provides them with opportunities for increased autonomy even as it brings them to the attention of a series of potentially coercive male gazers. Somerset, like Gabriel Oak, is the worthy yet self-effacing suitor who nonetheless attempts to impose various visions of Paula onto his reluctant object of affection, while Captain De Stancy, his rival, combines qualities of Troy and Boldwood and is thus even more willing to manipulate her in order to achieve his erotic and social ends. Unsurprisingly, therefore, voyeurism, surveillance, and spying play a significant role in this text as well, since Paula’s transgressively “masculine” empowerment through the possession of her father’s
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money and Stancy Castle brings her under the keen eye of patriarchy. As it turns out, however, Paula is going to prove more adept than Bathsheba at, if not exactly escaping, then at least mitigating masculine attempts to contain her, abetted by her facility with modern technology and the particular personality type that gives the book its title, both of which act as instruments of evasion. In particular, A Laodicean returns to questions of discipline and embodiment raised in Far from the Madding Crowd in order to further complicate the idea of cultural constraint in new formulations of modernity. Of course any novel whose main character has the surname “Power” makes the temptation to invoke Foucault (and indulge in some questionable wordplay) difficult to avoid. Yet if Far from the Madding Crowd’s blend of spectacle and surveillance helps qualify what some Foucauldian practitioners have constructed as a “totalizing paradigm in which human subjectivity is reduced to the effect of an inescapable mode of domination,” 11 then A Laodicean continues this process by exploring possibilities of agency, particularly female agency, which may be generated within a panoptic regime. Anna Maria Jones, in her recent study Problem Novels: Victorian Fiction Theorizes the Sensational Self, summarizes the issue by suggesting that “[t]he difficulty . . . is one of theorizing cultural power and critical agency in a way that, on the one hand, takes into account the ubiquity (and complexity) of modern power and, on the other hand, allows for the possibility of culturally embedded subjects engaging with and critiquing forms of power in self-conscious ways,”12 and it is precisely this difficulty that Paula, as a Laodicean within the text, and Hardy, as the producer of a text called A Laodicean, confronts. One of Jones’ arguments is that sensation fiction is an especially fruitful kind of writing for exploring such ambivalence, because its focus on identity construction reinforces “the notion of the subject as becoming rather than simply being,” and that “by inviting the reader to participate in these stories of ambivalent agency, [such] texts are theorizing themselves and the act of reading as intricately connected to [Victorian] culture’s emerging social possibilities for selffashioning.”13 Clearly, instead of approaching A Laodicean as a work that fails to achieve its potential as a realist text, it is much more fruitful to see it as a novel employing melodrama and sensation in order to highlight the tensions within an increasingly dominant but non-totalized disciplinary regime. Through the excess of plot twists that deny the requirements of formalist unity, and the presentation of characters that refuse to meet realism’s standards of verisimilitude, Hardy insists upon the unruliness of a nascent modernity whose complex individual expressions can only be represented by a hybrid narrative that mimics the mixed forms of agency now available. Somerset’s early invocation of Paula as “ ‘[a] mixed young
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lady, rather’ ” (L 37) announces her as the main embodiment of this elusive subjectivity, so that the novel’s central theme is reinforced by its form and characterization, not betrayed by them. The text begins with a description of Somerset that declares “he had more of the beauty—if beauty it ought to be called—of the future human type than of the past” (L 8), and that he “had suffered from the modern malady of unlimited appreciativeness as much as any living man of his own age” (L 12). These characterizations suggest affinities with Paula, who we are told is “emphatically a modern type of maidenhood” (L 17) and “holds advanced views on social and other matters” (L 170), but they also suggest a shared laodiceanism. Somerset’s inability to ardently commit himself to a particular architectural style indicates a general tendency to be “lukewarm,” and constructs him quite deliberately as antithetical to the extremes of melodrama. The narrator notes that “[it] being the month of August, when the pale face of the townsman and stranger is to be seen among the brown skins of remotest uplanders . . . few of the homeward-bound labourers paused to notice him further than by a momentary turn of the head” (L 8), so that “[t]he spectacle of a summer traveller from London sketching mediæval details in these neo-Pagan days” (L 9) turns out to be largely uninteresting. The material reason for this, of course, is the ubiquitous railway travel that will play a significant role later in the novel, but for now it is only necessary to note that Somerset’s early dissociation from excess and the spectacular aligns him with the kind of disciplinary surveillance connected to sensation fiction. He is someone who watches, not someone who attracts attention, and this tendency is reinforced by Hardy’s provision of a sensation scene whose voyeurism recalls, but does not directly reproduce, Oak’s initial spying on Bathsheba. The most important difference is that Paula, although not aware of Somerset’s gaze, is aware that others are watching her, and this generates a type of self-consciousness that can be used to create a qualified self-determination. There can be little doubt that the baptism scene (or rather, the failed baptism scene) provided in Chapter II has significant gender implications, and these have been well recognized by other critics. Somerset’s peering through the window of the chapel, “ERECTED 187–, at the sole expense of JOHN POWER, ESQ., M.P.” (L 13), as Paula tries to force herself to go through the public ceremony she promised her father on his deathbed, is obviously a man gazing into a masculine space, and Thomas is right to describe the building as “a monument to coercive patriarchy, with parson Woodwell as its agent.”14 Nonetheless, Paula’s sudden, sensational refusal to go through with the ritual, which “[d]uring the exciting moments of her recusancy” causes “a perceptible flutter among the sensitive members of the congregation” (L 18), complicates the question of just
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enough was shown to assure Somerset that she had had some experience of things far removed from her present circumscribed horizon, and could live, and was even at that moment living, a clandestine, stealthy inner life which had very little to do with her present outward one. The repression of nearly every external sign of that distress under which Somerset knew, by a sudden intuitive sympathy, that she was labouring, added strength to these convictions. (L 17)
Somerset’s “conviction” that his “intuitive sympathy” will provide access to the “clandestine, stealthy inner life” Paula is leading, a quality that would identify him as her most proper potential husband, is one he wishes to believe he possesses throughout the rest of the book. This would seem to support the idea that, in a novel “packed with instances of ‘looking’ and ‘seeing,’ often from odd angles of vision . . . or of spying and peeping . . . it is the male characters who occupy these superior and furtive vantage points, and in relation to Paula . . . this reinforces the ‘enigma’ of her ‘character’, representing her only as reflected images of the male gaze.”15 Yet Paula’s quick withdrawal into the chapel vestry removes her from his and the other parishioners’ prying view, and although Woodwell launches into a blistering sermon that “meant mischief to the person who had caused the hitch” (L 18), her response to the attack is hidden, which leaves everyone staring at “that vestry-door as if they would almost push it open by the force of their gazing” (L 19—emphasis added). Thus although “[a]t this moment there was not in the whole chapel a person whose imagination was not centred on what was invisibly taking place within the vestry-door” (L 19), the very fact of that invisibility suggests Paula’s ability to on some level shut down the gaze, even as her eventual quiet closing of the vestry door shuts out Woodwell’s denunciation. I would suggest, therefore, that Thomas rather overstates the case when she argues that “[t]he sanctuary of the vestry is a delusion. Inside Paula is trapped and helpless—unable to act to defend herself or to remove herself from censure.”16 Hardy makes it clear as the novel progresses that the chapel needs Paula much more than Paula needs the chapel, since “this young woman’s power of persistence in her unexpected repugnance to the rite was strengthened by wealth and position” (L 19). Woodwell’s eventual (belated) concern that he should not have alienated his congregation’s main/only benefactor turns out to be quite right. She slowly stops attending chapel services, and by Chapter IV of Book the Third the reader discovers
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who is in “power” here. On one hand, it immediately provokes Somerset into a type of intrusive speculation that hints at secrets crying out to be penetrated:
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that “[t]he mysterious tank, with its dark waters that had so repelled her at the last moment, was boarded over” (L 202), so that there seems little doubt that ultimately it is the minister who has been defeated in their conflict. This early encounter hints that Paula is very far from being a docile body, and foreshadows future instances in which she will refuse to be “embodied” in ways wholly susceptible to masculine control. The full voyeuristic, sensationalized eroticism of this scene, which would have resulted had Paula emerged from the pool with her “ample robe of flowing white” (L 16) clinging to her body, is nullified by her refusal to enter the water. She thus successfully evades the literally paternalistic desire of John Power, the more sublimated, patriarchal religious desire of Reverend Woodwell, and the not-yet-completely-formulated sexual desire of George Somerset, through a single gesture of self-assertion. It is important, therefore, that the nineteenth-century issue of adult baptism specifically invoked by the text not be ignored completely in favor of gender concerns, as legitimate as those may be. Hardy’s inclusion in the novel of specific Establishment rebuttals to Baptist arguments for adult immersion, provided by Somerset’s debate with Woodwell in front of Paula (L 59–61), might seem to support some critics’ position that his autodidacticism gets in the way of his art. Somerset’s parade of knowledge, which at one point creates “an interest in his ingenious argument [that] was revealed in spite of herself by the mobile bosom of Miss Paula Power” (L 60), might be seen as Hardy showing off much in the way his protagonist is. But that is not all that is going on. At the core of the Baptist argument is the question of agency—the idea that baptism can only be effective if undertaken after a considered and public declaration of faith, and that since an infant is in no position to express such agency, pædobaptism is illegitimate. If Paula had gone through with the ceremony she would have, as it were, used her agency to surrender her agency by agreeing to follow the strictures established by her father and represented by the surrogate father figure of Woodwell. But, by invoking the possibility of agency, John Power and the Reverend Woodwell have miscalculated, for it creates in Paula the potential to use her agency to refuse the subjectivity they wish to impose. By declining to provide a spectacle for the assembled audience to witness (the spectacle of the soaked and exposed form of the richest young lady in the region), Paula rejects the melodrama of communal experience in favor of an individuation that demonstrates that, as Goodlad puts it, “[t]o be free is not—as in crude liberal thought— to escape to some autonomous realm outside of power, but, rather, to exercise one’s own power to influence and be influenced by others.”17 Thus Hardy’s use of a sensation scene centered on an aborted baptism, with its invocation of an agency compromised by surveillance but not absolutely
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controlled by it, suggests a modern “relational theory of power predicated on enduring contest and the possibility of change.”18 The religious context of this early set of striking incidents forcefully establishes the novel’s central theme, especially as it pertains to its main female character, and prepares for the further development of that theme through her extended efforts to maintain an independent embodiment. As Somerset strolls away from the chapel, his thought about Paula that “caprice was not foreign to her composition” (L 20) echoing Oak’s early and equally questionable judgment on Bathsheba, he notices a telegraph wire that he assumes will lead him to Sleeping-Green, the village in which he has arranged to spend the night. Upon following it, however, he discovers that the wire instead leads to “the walls and towers of a castle, half ruin, half residence,” so that “its final course . . . leaped across the moat, over the girdling wall, and thence by a tremendous stretch towards the keep where . . . it vanished through an arrow-slit into the interior” (L 22). This linking of the very new with the very old is another way of heralding Paula’s mixed nature, since she is the one who has arranged a private telegraph link to Stancy Castle, but it also identifies the device that most obviously sets this novel apart from all of Hardy’s other fiction: his use of sensationally cutting-edge Victorian technology to characterize his heroine. Paula’s skill as a telegrapher invokes both her modernity and her all but completely successful attempt to neutralize masculine surveillance. Her ability to send aural messages that, of the other characters, only she and Charlotte de Stancy are able to decode creates a secret and private feminine communicative space in sharp contrast with the publicly scopophilic male space of her father’s chapel. Jay Clayton’s insightful reading of how this division functions is worth noting at some length: Hardy structures several pivotal events around the rival effects of optical and acoustic technologies—photography and architectural drawings on the one hand, and the telegraph on the other . . . Whereas Hardy systematically links the heroine and her female friend to the telegraph’s music, he connects all of the men in the novel—and especially the villain—with visual technology and the production of images . . . The power to manipulate the visual domain through technological mediation symbolizes the masculine aggression whose aim is the possession of the heroine’s body and castle. The difference between the hero and his two adversaries lies only in the motive for his desire, not in its objectifying nature. Although Somerset’s motive is love, Captain De Stancy’s lust, and Dare’s avarice, they are united in wanting to take legal possession of what they see.19
Hardy, as he did in Desperate Remedies, suggests a congruency between ostensibly opposed male heroes and villains in order to emphasize the
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beleaguered situation of his heroine, a repetition that reinforces the connections between it and A Laodicean as works of sensation fiction. Further, in order to demonstrate the problematic nature of Somerset’s response to Paula, and her ability to resist that response, he utilizes the kind of closely situated parallel scenes found in Far from the Madding Crowd. In this case both incidents are centered on an absent body instead of one prominently displayed but, as in the earlier novel, they invoke the voyeuristic, masculine power of looking only to subvert it and demonstrate its limitations. Paula’s ability to fend off the advances of the men surrounding her exceeds that of both Cytherea and Bathsheba because her embrace of technology gives her access to forms of autonomy that elide the restrictions of bodily discipline even as they retain the expression of bodily sensation. That Somerset finds this as disconcerting as does De Stancy is hardly surprising, and although the conventions of sensation fiction require that the younger man defeat his older rival, they also provide Hardy with the opportunity to insist that this is very far from achieving a victory over the young woman they both pursue. When Somerset enters Stancy Castle for the first time he is “conscious that his interest did not much lie in the architecture” (L 37). Thus when an open door makes visible “a room containing one of the finest Renaissance cabinets he had ever seen” (L 37) he is perhaps not completely unhappy to discover that in examining it he has “[w]ithout knowing it . . . intruded into the absent Miss Paula’s own particular set of chambers, including a boudoir and sleeping apartment” (L 37). The result is, first of all, an inventory of Paula’s reading tastes as the sitting room contains “most of the popular papers and periodicals that he knew, not only English, but from Paris, Italy, and America,” along with “books from a London circulating library, papercovered light literature in French and choice Italian, and the latest monthly reviews” (L 37–38). This catalogue reinforces Paula’s modernity while giving Somerset a material glimpse of her “interior” interests, something he could not achieve watching her through the chapel window. Here Paula’s absence increases her susceptibility to the male gaze, because Somerset is free to construct her according to his own interpretation of what he looks at. This is taken a step further when, seeing that “[t]he door between this ante-chamber and the sleeping-room stood open” (L 38), he can now enjoy an even greater sense of intimacy as “[w]ithout venturing to cross the threshold . . . Somerset looked in for a moment” (L 38). It was a pretty place . . . In a corner, overhung by a blue and white canopy of silk, was a little cot, hardly large enough to impress the character of a bedroom upon the old place. Upon a counterpane lay a parasol and a silk handkerchief. On the other side of the room was a tall mirror . . . draped like
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All of these potential fetish objects invoke Paula’s body (the virginal “small cot” in which her body lies at night, the parasol that shields it, the mirror that reflects it, the handkerchief, satin slippers, and dressing gown that come into close contact with it), so that Somerset’s erotic engagement is amplified by an implied presence that is nonetheless not actually there to challenge the sexual fantasy he has been developing since his desire to see that exposed body was denied by Paula’s withdrawal from the baptism scene. The agency expressed there is no obstacle here, although Somerset has the decency to feel at least some discomfort about this strangely disembodied voyeurism. He is aware that a dressing room lies beyond the sleeping chamber, “but, becoming conscious that his study of ancient architecture would hardly bear stretching further in that direction without injury to his morals, Mr. Somerset retreated to the outside, passing by, without notice, the gem of Renaissance that had led him in” (L 38). Having penetrated Paula’s boudoir with his own body, and her bedroom with his gaze, Somerset is not willing to risk his “morals” by penetrating even further into this female space. What Hardy seems to be suggesting here is that Paula is most vulnerable when she is completely removed from the field of (bodily and literary) sensation, because this is not an escape from corporeal discipline but instead an exposure to its unmediated patriarchal projection. As an emptied out signifier she runs the risk of becoming wholly constructed by the men whose fixation upon her has little to do with who she is and much to do with their limiting eroticized response to her, as we shall shortly see demonstrated again with Captain De Stancy. But A Laodicean is not so simplistic as to suggest that its heroine can either resist such an imposition directly or avoid it completely. Instead the text explores “the ‘contingent’ nature of agency that can be both exercised within and erased by social interactions”20 as Paula is represented employing shifting strategies to create as much autonomy as possible within the generic and cultural inevitabilities of a marriage-plot novel. And it is through her association with telegraphy that Hardy signals what may be achieved through dis/embodied female sensation. When Somerset returns to the castle the morning after his scrutiny of the accoutrements of Paula’s inner chambers, he is greeted by Charlotte, but the conversation is quickly interrupted by a servant who enters “to tell Miss De Stancy that the telegraph was calling her” (L 42). The anthropomorphism implied by this statement is reinforced through the narrator’s
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the bedstead, in blue and white. Thrown at random upon the floor was a pair of satin slippers that would have fitted Cinderella. A dressing gown lay across a settee. (L 38)
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subsequent declaration that “[t]he telegraph had almost the attributes of a human being at Stancy Castle . . . people rushed to the old tapestried chamber allotted to it, and waited its pleasure with all the deference due to such a novel inhabitant of that ancestral pile” (L 52), so that the possibility of creating a “personal” relationship with/through technology is established early. Given Somerset’s predilection for gazing and peering, it is predictable that he finds himself uncomfortable in the presence of an encoded aural message he cannot decipher, and tries to conceptualize it in his own terms: when Charlotte “applied her ear to the instrument, and began to gather the message,” Somerset “fancied himself like a person overlooking another’s letter, and moved aside” (L 42). Since this exchange between women cannot be “looked over” he must rely on Charlotte to interpret it for him, and he senses quite clearly the disadvantage under which this places him, especially when he discovers that Paula is in fact talking about him. “Oh—and it is about—you,” murmured Miss De Stancy. “Me?” The architect blushed a little. She made no answer, and the machine went on with its story. There was something curious in watching this utterance about himself, under his very nose, in language unintelligible to him. He conjectured whether it were inquiry, praise, or blame, with a sense that it might reasonably be the latter, as the result of his surreptitious look into that blue bedroom, possibly observed and reported by some servant of the house. (L 42)
Somerset’s guilty recollection of his previous day’s trespass specifically links this scene with the earlier one, but in this case he is the one exposed, if only to his own conscience, by a “machine . . . story” in an “unintelligible language” that no amount of “watching” can make legible to him. Tellingly Paula directs Charlotte to ensure “that every facility be given to Mr. Somerset to visit any part of the castle he may wish to see” (L 42—italics in the original), reestablishing her prerogative to give or withhold access to her domestic/bodily space. More crucial, however, is that she achieves this through a technology that creates a kind of absent presence, a sensational feat that allows her wishes to be known instantly even though she is miles away. As Christopher Keep notes, “[w]hat most struck observers of the instrument in the nineteenth century was not so much the speed with which it was capable of transmitting a message from one location to another, but the uncanny effect such speed produced. The sender of a message seemed to by physically present in the same room as the receiver, as if his or her body were reaching out through the wires to makes itself felt across the distance.”21 Paula’s ability to be both there and not there
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at the same time is her great advantage over Bathsheba, who is simply unable to escape the sight of the men who pursue her and who, therefore, cannot produce the independence available to her more modern counterpart. I have several times described telegraph technology as “sensational,” and it is necessary to reinforce that here again I am invoking both meanings of the word. Telegraphy was a cultural sensation because it revolutionized the dissemination of information but, as Clayton argues, this may present difficulties of comprehension to contemporary readers, who associate advanced communications technology with disembodiment . . . Such was not how the first electric communications network was experienced. Nineteenth-century observers were fascinated by the fact that telegraphic signals could be read by any of the senses . . . For example, one writer tells of repairmen who commonly read the wires with their tongue . . . another author explains how operators would hold ends of wire in each hand and read the signal “by means of the passage of shocks” through the body . . . Similarly, the manual operation of the telegraph worked against the abstraction of sound from the tactile realm.22
The Victorian association of the telegraph with the sensual, with the production of physical sensations, means that Paula’s facility with the instrument is not an attempt to deny her female body, but rather a method for expressing its sensuality in a way that frees it from conventional responses and restrictions. To say that she is dis/embodied, therefore, is to suggest a form of subjectivity that refuses the material/abstract binary in favor of a mixed expression of self that creates a potentially liberating fluidity. But of course the telegraph could create other potentialities. In 1889, eight years after the publication of A Laodicean, the Tory Prime Minister Lord Salisbury, addressing the newly reconstituted Institution of Electrical Engineers (formerly the Society of Telegraph Engineers), placed their founding technology “at the center of modern state organization”23 by declaring that it was “a discovery which operates . . . immediately upon the moral and intellectual nature and action of mankind” because it “assembled all mankind upon one great plane, where they can see everything that is done, and hear everything that is said, and judge of every policy that is pursued at the very moment those events take place.”24 This evocation of global surveillance and eavesdropping in the service of universal judgment hardly seems libratory, suggesting as it does the disciplinary power of instant and constant awareness, and also the contingency of the autonomy it makes available to Paula “Power.” From within the interstices of the worldwide grid she may be able to run a private wire into her castle,
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SENSATIONAL BODIES, MELODRAMATIC SPECTACLES
but its battlements cannot shut out the truth that whatever individual freedom is thus gained can only exist as part of a wider matrix of control in which she is also enmeshed. The telegraph and its wires thus become an apt symbol for the ambivalence of Paula’s position, another aspect of her laodiceanism, in that whatever personal opportunities for self-expression this modern technology offers come at the cost of an unstated integration with an increasingly regulated network of (self)restraint. Nonetheless, Paula’s association with telegraphy and the sensational autonomous body it generates is Hardy’s way, as it was with Bathsheba’s eventual alignment with sensationalism in Far from the Madding Crowd, of suggesting her successful movement into this newly forming paradigm, and Somerset’s eventual (grudging) acceptance of that autonomy marks his own movement into contingently disciplined modernity as well. In order for the pattern to be fully realized, however, Hardy once again provides representatives of the older paradigm of melodramatic spectacle to be defeated, and that thankless task falls to Captain De Stancy and his illegitimate, theatrically devious son William Dare. De Stancy’s status as a soldier provides an obvious connection to Sergeant Troy, as does his former behavior as a rake, while his failure to marry Dare’s mother echoes Troy’s relationship with Fanny. As we shall see, in his pursuit of Paula he will also demonstrate Troy’s willingness to make a spectacle of himself, but when he is first introduced into A Laodicean he seems more aligned with the sergeant’s most direct rival. Like Boldwood, De Stancy initially has no desire to see the fascinating young woman newly arrived in the neighborhood, telling his sister Charlotte that he “ ‘prefer[s] to remain a stranger to Miss Power—Miss Steam-Power, she ought to be called—and all her possessions’ ” (L 153). Indeed, De Stancy declares “ ‘I have been nicknamed the man with the averted eyes—the man with the detestable habit—the man who greets you with his shoulder, and so on. Ninety-and-nine fair women at the present moment hate me like poison and death for having persistently refused to plumb the depths of their offered eyes’ ” (L 161), all of which echoes Boldwood’s initial resistance to female charm. Further, Somerset perceives “a sort of ascetic self-repression” (L 154) in the captain’s character, while Charlotte explicitly describes her brother as “ ‘a bit of a woman-hater, or at least a confirmed bachelor’ ” (L 179). Although De Stancy’s self-suppression is more calculated and self-aware than Boldwood’s, once it is breached he finds himself in a similar reactive state of extremity and excess, which allows the text to enter the full-blown melodramatic mode prepared for by its earlier sections. Dare’s manipulation of his reluctant father into a secret viewing of Paula’s semiprivate gymnastics has much the same effect as Bathsheba’s ill-advised valentine, but in this case the arousal that results is
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fully intended. Yet another instance in which Paula is subject to surveillance and a clandestine gaze, this scene replicates Somerset’s viewing of the failed baptism while raising similar issues of agency. Its main purpose, however, is to illustrate the sharply contrasting responses of the two men, in order to emphasize the differing systems they represent. The “sort of optical poem” (L 172) that Paula creates in her “pink flannel costume” while “bending, wheeling, and undulating in the air like a gold-fish in its globe” as the “white manilla ropes [cling] about the performer like snakes” (L 173) is an even more dramatic exhibition than Bathsheba’s display of agile horsewomanship. Although she does not realize De Stancy is watching her, Paula has arranged to have an audience in the figures of Charlotte and her Aunt Mrs. Goodman, so that this performative “presentation of herself ” (L 173) in an officially female space once again suggests Paula’s qualified success at bodily self-determination. Although it is certainly possible to suggest that Paula has been turned into a quasi-public spectacle by the uninvited observation of De Stancy, and by the observation of De Stancy himself by Dare and Havill who, we are told, can “almost see the aspect of her within the wall, so accurately were her changing phases reflected in him” (L 174), there is nonetheless a marked difference in Paula’s full control over her body and De Stancy’s loss of control over his: “ ‘A fermentation is beginning in him,’ said Dare, half-pitifully; ‘a purely chemical process; and when it is complete he will probably be clear, and fiery, and sparkling, and quite another man than the good, weak, easy fellow that he was’ ” (L 174). Like Boldwood, yet unlike Somerset, whose personality remains essentially the same after his scopophilic experience at the chapel, De Stancy is transformed by desire— a “changed man” (L 177) as the narrator puts it—but while Paula’s agency remains intact the older man’s is weakened, because he is now in thrall to his reawakened caddish nature and has become a tool of Dare’s machinations. Roger Ebbatson, therefore, correctly insists that “[w]hilst Hardy’s gymnasium scene stages the society of the spectacle . . . it possesses a range of signification . . . the men are excluded from Paula’s domain and possess no control over her movement or over their own in viewing pleasure; to that extent the gymnasium scene might thus be read as both deploying and refusing traditional gender roles.”25 In order to achieve the marriage he now craves De Stancy must draw Paula further into the premodern sphere symbolized by his aristocratic name and the castle that his family formerly possessed but that she now owns—into an antiquity that “had been a civilization of spectacle”26 and whose institutions, “the discipline-blockade, the enclosed institution, established on the edges of society . . . breaking communications,”27 are diametrically opposed to the sensational flows of telegraphy. That he comes as close to succeeding as he does is Hardy’s
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SENSATIONAL BODIES, MELODRAMATIC SPECTACLES
way of confirming the still powerful influence of spectacle in late Victorian culture. Once moved into a “Boldwoodian” fixation on Paula, De Stancy is now free to indulge the Troy-like elements of his character, and he proves an adept melodramatic plotter as he maneuvers to gain advantage over Somerset. Although he also has Dare intriguing on his behalf, the older man is quite capable of concocting his own opportunities to influence her. Having convinced his sister to formally introduce him to Paula, De Stancy joins them on a tour of the castle’s picture gallery, where, we are told, his resemblance to many of the portraits creates in her “a new and romantic feeling that the De Stancys had stretched out a tentacle from their genealogical tree to seize her by the hand and draw her in to their mass” (L 187). Having related to his female audience the story of an ancestor who killed himself because of unrequited love, De Stancy then leads them to the display of that ancestor’s coat of mail, including the sword with which he stabbed himself, before escorting them to the picture of that same predecessor. Taking advantage of Charlotte’s observation that he “ ‘also is one whom they say you resemble a little in feature’ ” (L 189), De Stancy moves quickly to create a striking tableau. He set down the candles, and asking the girls to withdraw for a moment, was inside the upper part of the suit of armour in incredibly quick time. Going then and placing himself in front of a low-hanging painting near the original, so as to be enclosed by the frame while covering the figure, arranging the sword as in the one above, and setting the light that it might fall in the right direction, he recalled them; when he put the question, “Is the resemblance strong?” He looked so much like a man of bygone times that neither of them replied, but remained curiously gazing at him. (L 189)
The employment of this gothic painting-that-comes-alive trope illustrates De Stancy’s willingness to become, almost literally, an object to be gazed at in order to fix Paula’s attention, something that is made even more spectacular when, after reciting the plaintive suicide-note poem that his ancestor wrote in his own blood before his death, he gestures toward finishing the performance. A solemn silence followed the close of the recital, which De Stancy improved by turning the point of the sword to his breast, resting the pommel upon the floor, and saying: “After writing that we may picture him turning this same sword in this same way, and falling on it thus.” He inclined his body forward as he spoke.
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Like Troy’s sword-exercise demonstration, the intense and unusual situation created here is meant to raise emotions and break down inhibitions— is, in a word, meant to be melodramatic—and it also creates a similar contrast to that established between Troy and Gabriel Oak, since De Stancy’s “willingness to be the observed in the scene contrasts sharply with Somerset’s unwillingness to be anything but the observer.”28 But the gaze established is different because, as already noted, Paula has resources not available to Bathsheba, so that while De Stancy’s performance “had impressed her, and he perceived it with a throb of fervour,” the narrator immediately qualifies this by stating “[b]ut it had done no more . . . for though in delivering the lines he had so fixed his look upon her as to suggest . . . a present significance in the words, the idea of any such doubleentendre had by no means commended itself to her soul” (L 191). If he is going to employ his melodramatic sensibility to persuade Paula into a less laodicean response De Stancy requires a more public and communal venue in which to enact his passion, and he does his best to both create and exploit it. The charity performance of Love’s Labour’s Lost Paula agrees to stage at Stancy Castle, in aid of the county hospital and with the roles filled “By the Officers of the Royal Horse Artillery . . . Assisted by Several Ladies of the Neighbourhood” (L 223), depends for its success on her participation. As Somerset is informed by one of the organizers, “ ‘being such a handsome girl, and so wealthy, and rather an undiscovered novelty in the county as yet, she would draw a crowded room, and greatly benefit the funds’ ” (L 225), and neither he nor the reader is surprised to discover that Captain De Stancy is the “ ‘originator entirely’ ” of this plan to benefit a region that his family has “ ‘been connected with . . . for so many centuries’ ” (L 225). De Stancy’s goal is to lay claim to Paula by creating a shared spectacle of them publicly acting out a romantic relationship in his ancestral castle, something that requires that he hold the role of the King of Navarre and she the Princess of France, so while Shakespeare’s play is a comedy the plotting/counterplotting that goes into arranging or attempting to thwart this situation provides its own melodrama. Somerset is amazed that “a young lady who, six months ago, would scarcely join for conscientious reasons in a simple dance on her own lawn, should now be willing to exhibit herself on a public stage, simulating love-passages with a stranger” (L 226),
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“Don’t, Captain De Stancy, please don’t!” cried Paula, involuntarily. “No, don’t show us any further, William!” said his sister. “It is too tragic.” De Stancy put away the sword, himself rather excited—not, however, by his own recital, but by the direct gaze of Paula at him. (L 190–191)
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and there is definitely an element of voyeurism that draws the audience to view her, since “[w]hen ladies, hitherto only beheld in frigid, impenetrable positions behind their coachmen in Markton High Street, were about to reveal their hidden traits, home attitudes, intimate smiles, nods, and perhaps kisses, to the public eye, it was a throwing open of fascinating social secrets not to be missed for money” (L 231). Yet as these two passages note, Paula’s exposure to “the public eye” occurs because she is “willing to exhibit herself,” suggesting again an ambivalent agency that now finds social exposure acceptable, but only on her own terms. Thus although De Stancy manages to outmaneuver both Paula and Somerset, he does not gain much through his plotting. Despite arranging to fill the role of the King opposite Paula’s Princess on the first night of the play, and despite introducing a spurious passage from Romeo and Juliet that allows him to bend over her and apparently deliver an unscripted kiss, we later learn that their lips did not actually meet. This is, of course, scant consolation to Somerset, especially since the audience’s reaction is “loud applause from the people in the cheap seats” (L 234), and his later, bitter statement to her that “I have no right to make observations—your actions are not subject to my surveillance” (L 239) does seem to imply that De Stancy has successfully drawn her out of Somerset’s disciplinary sphere into the soldier’s world of spectacle; but things are not so simple. As Paula saucily declares, “ ‘A miss is as good as a mile, says the time-honoured proverb; and it is not for us modern mortals to question its truth’ ” (L 239), making it clear that she has remained “untouched” both literally and emotionally by De Stancy’s ruse. And when Somerset suggests to Paula that she could make her commitment to him clear by permitting him “ ‘to do really and in earnest what [De Stancy] only seemed to do in the play’ ” (L 240) her response is unequivocal: “ ‘No . . . That cannot be. He did not nor must you’ ” (L 241). To this point then, which is halfway through the novel, Paula has successfully defended her bodily autonomy, clearly standing in for her social and sexual autonomy, from both the men courting her, even as that body has been increasingly revealed to various types of gaze. As her love life becomes more complex, however, Hardy’s representation of embodiment likewise increases in complexity, and his distinctive way of advancing this theme rests on a physically basic yet culturally fraught indicator of sensations—the act of blushing.29 We have already touched on several scenes in which blushing makes an appearance. Somerset blushes when he discovers that the original telegraph message between Paula and Charlotte is discussing him, while Paula is “very red in the face” (L 234) after De Stancy appears to kiss her in the play, and the narrator informs us that Somerset’s “face blazed like a coal” (L 134) at the applause that follows this display of false intimacy. As well, in yet
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another reiteration of Far from the Madding Crowd, Somerset’s admission that he observed Paula refuse the baptism ceremony—his blunt “ ‘I saw it’ ” (L 62) echoing Oak’s “ ‘I saw you’ ” to Bathsheba after observing her pony tricks—leads to a similar response: Bathsheba displays a “hot face” while Paula “blushed and looked past him down the river” (L 62). Although both young women are uncomfortable about being watched during apparent improprieties, each quickly regains control of the situation, Bathsheba by rendering Oak invisible through ignoring him, and Paula by sending Somerset hurrying after Reverend Woodwell to return his forgotten Bible, thus effectively “disappearing” him from her sight and relieving the awkward situation. It is only after he has completed his errand that he stops to wonder about ulterior motives: There then arose the question whether her dispatching him after the minister was such an admirable act of good-nature to a good man as it had at first seemed to be. Perhaps it was simply a manœuvre for getting rid of himself . . . As the possibility of levity crossed his brain, his face warmed; it pained him to think that a woman so interesting could condescend to a trick of even so mild a complexion as that. (L 75)
Paula manages to deliver the last blush, as it were, by causing Somerset’s face to warm at the suspicion that he has been tricked. There are certainly some significant blushes in Far from the Madding Crowd, but the amount of blushing in A Laodicean far exceeds that in the earlier novel, and it seems clear that Hardy is employing it as part of a larger pattern, as the oft-quoted lines from Of the Progress of the Soul: The Second Anniversary, make clear: She, of whose soul if we may say, ’twas gold, Her body was th’ electrum, and did hold Many degrees of that; we understood Her by her sight, her pure and eloquent blood Spoke in her cheeks, and so distinctly wrought That one might almost say, her body thought.30
In Donne’s description of Elizabeth Drury the blush becomes a way for the body to manifest itself, to express its sensations in a publicly revealed response; or, as Yeazell puts it, “the young woman’s red cheek was her heart—and other organs—made visible.”31 Like the telegraph, the blush sends a message to those in a position to act as receivers, but, also like the telegraph, that message requires a complex decoding to be read correctly, and the text’s insistence on the difficulty of that process implies yet another way for its heroine to elide the restrictive male subjectivities attempting to encompass her.
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A LAODICEAN
SENSATIONAL BODIES, MELODRAMATIC SPECTACLES
In his article “Faciality and Sensation in Hardy’s The Return of the Native” William A. Cohen employs a central theory of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari to argue that in that novel “Hardy demonstrates how the body can reterritorialize the face, for by emphasizing the function of the face both as an inlet for bodily sensation and as a material entity . . . he resists its absorption into the univocality of facialized determinants,”32 and I would argue that something very similar occurs in A Laodicean. In A Thousand Plateaus what Deleuze and Guattari denote “the faciality machine” is a regulatory system that attempts to impose conventional and conformist routines of response by making the face the only location of meaning: “[a] concerted effort is made to do away with the body and corporeal coordinates through which the multidimensional or polyvocal semiotics operated. Bodies are disciplined, corporeality dismantled, becoming-animal hounded out . . . a jump is made from the organic strata to the strata of signifiance [sic] and subjectification.”33 A Laodicean both invokes and then problematizes faciality in its presentation of Somerset’s reaction to Paula and his melodramatic neardeath on the railway tracks. Having caught each other’s hands as they rush out of the way of the oncoming engine, once it has passed Paula quickly becomes self-conscious and pulls hers away, “whereupon Somerset stopped and looked earnestly at her; but her eyes were averted towards the tunnel wall” (L 98). Because Paula will not look at him, and refuses Somerset’s offer to walk her back to her carriage after this traumatic event, he is left to ponder what her reaction revealed as the crisis occurred: He recalled her face as it had looked out at him from under the white silk puffing of her black hat, and the speaking power of her eyes at the moment of danger. The breadth of that clear-complexioned forehead—almost concealed by the masses of brown hair bundled up around it—signified that if her disposition was oblique and insincere enough for trifling, coquetting, or in any way making a fool of him, she had the intellect to do it cruelly well. But it was ungenerous to ruminate so suspiciously. A girl not an actress by profession could hardly turn pale artificially as she had done, though perhaps mere fright meant nothing, and would have arisen in her just as readily had he been one of the labourers on her estate. Upon the whole it was a perplexity. (L 98–99)
On one hand, Somerset seems phrenologically certain that Paula’s wide and “clear-complexioned” forehead demonstrates intelligence, but he is stymied as to whether she is otherwise capable of “trifling” or “coquetting.” He cannot, therefore, be sure of the significance of this supposed certainty. Similarly, he is unable to interpret her pallor—was it caused by
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a general fright, or was it a more specific fear caused by a threat to him, which might suggest romantic interest? The text suggests that any effort to read only the face and ignore the body is insufficient, because what is being examined is “not a face but the abstract machine that produces faces according to the changeable combinations of its cogwheels. Do not expect the abstract machine to resemble what it produces, or will produce.”34 Somerset’s effort to understand Paula through her dis/embodied face is exposed as fundamentally flawed, since he is attempting to apply fixed, culturally predetermined designations to a woman who is herself neither fixed nor predetermined. Representations of blushing, then, become a way of subverting faciality, because they break down the “dualist opposition between body and mind,” and show that for Hardy “[t]he face is the body’s principal repository of perception, the influx and outflow of physical sensation, with which affective and intellectual impressions are frequently conflated.”35 Perhaps the two best examples of this occur when Dare, worrying that De Stancy is losing his romantic contest with Somerset, intervenes to assist his father by trying to blacken his rival’s character. Dare’s first attempt at this consists of a false telegraph, supposedly from Somerset, declaring that the younger man has gambled away all his money at Monte Carlo and begging Paula to save him from “disgrace” (L 289) by immediately sending him one hundred pounds. Dare attempts to turn Paula’s defining technology against her, and at first his trick appears to work, for while contemplating Somerset’s supposed ignominy the narrator informs us that “[a] curious little blush crept over her sobered face—perhaps it was a blush of shame at the conduct of the young man in whom she had of late been suspiciously interested” (L 291). The most interesting thing about this description is its indeterminacy. Paula’s blush is “curious,” and “perhaps” it arises from her shame at Somerset’s conduct—or perhaps it arises from her own shame at being attracted to such a man, or perhaps she is ashamed that she continues to be attracted to him even after this disgrace, or perhaps she is embarrassed because all of this has been exposed to De Stancy. Each of these is a legitimate interpretive possibility, and even the narrator cannot be sure which is accurate, “perhaps” because some mixture of all these affective reactions are playing themselves out within Paula and finding ambiguous expression in her features. A blush, then, is not subject to the types of interpretive codes encouraged by faciality, because it is enmeshed with the body in ways that generate complexity. In the railway-track scene Somerset was perplexed because he wished to receive binary information from Paula’s face: she was either being a coquette or she was not; she was either afraid for him specifically or she was not. Blushes cannot be reduced in this way because they open out possibilities instead of closing them down—“merely
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Paula observed it, thoroughly took it in; but the effect upon her was by no means clear. Charlotte’s eyes at once forsook the portrait to dwell on Paula’s face. It paled a little, and then this was followed by a hot blush—perceptibly a blush of shame. That was all. She flung the picture down on the table, and moved away. (L 319)
This is a complicated piece of byplay. Paula, looking at a (falsified) representation of Somerset’s face, in turn has her own face observed by Charlotte, whose shock at the picture is itself suggestive, while both of their reactions are seen by Dare and Abner Power. The declaration that Paula’s response is “perceptibly a blush of shame” is undercut by the earlier statement that the photograph’s “effect upon her was by no means clear,” so that once again what she is ashamed of is ambiguous. Although Paula’s relationship with Somerset is certainly damaged by this fraud, the narrator’s attempt to sum up what has been revealed is suitably convoluted: Paula seemed to be more hurt by what the silence of her companion implied—a suspicion that the discovery of Somerset’s depravity was wounding her heart—than by the wound itself. The ostensible ease with which she drew them into a bye conversation had perhaps the defect of proving too much: though her tacit contention that no love was in question was not incredible on the supposition that affronted pride alone caused her embarrassment. The chief symptom of her heart being really tender towards Somerset consisted in her apparent blindness to Charlotte’s secret, so obviously suggested by her momentary agitation. (L 321)
Blushing is sensational because as an uncontrolled exposure of bodily reaction it makes that response visible while at the same time provoking open-ended speculation. The blusher alone retains the complex secret of what the blush actually means; it is a mystery that draws those viewing it inevitably toward interpretation, but an interpretation that cannot finally be sure of its adequacy. This takes us back to my previous quotation from Jones’ Problem Novels, and her assertion that sensation fiction is more concerned with becoming than with being, an idea that is crucial to Deleuze and Guattari. As Cohen
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to know that someone is blushing is scarcely to know what signals she is sending.”36 This is reinforced through Dare’s second attempt at character assassination. Having altered a photograph of Somerset to give it “the distorted features and wild attitude of a man advanced in intoxication” (L 319) Dare allows it to fall into Paula’s view.
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puts it, “[t]he face for them must be prized away from its normalizing functions and instead understood as an unpredictable process of sensation and becoming,”37 which is precisely what Hardy’s use of blushing achieves. The process of a blush measures in real time the waxing and waning of a physical response, on one hand opening up that response to surveillance but on the other thwarting surveillance’s efforts to assign a defining, restrictive significance to what it sees—it suggests “a rhizomatic realm of possibility effecting the potentialization of the possible, as opposed to arborescent possibility, which masks a closure, an impotence.”38 Significantly, therefore, blushing in A Laodicean is mainly associated with Paula and Somerset, the two characters who are still in a very basic sense “unformed”; that is, who still possess the possibility of “becoming” because their laodicean natures remain potentialized. Their association with sensation and sensationalism through blushing demarcates the kind of limited agency the text has been exploring from different angles, by suggesting another way in which the body can partially neutralize disciplinary regimes. It also draws a sharp distinction between them and those characters most specifically associated with melodrama, which is to say those characters whom readers that dislike the novel find most offensive—the “cosmopolite Dare” (L 74) and the “man who had come from afar” (L 236), Abner Power. McDowall is again representative in his comments, since after dismissing these two figures as indicators of “an overstrained plot” he suggests that they cannot engage the reader, “for Dare has always had a hollowness and Abner has never begun to be real.”39 This interpretation assumes once more that Hardy is attempting to work within the constraints of organically unified psychological realism, and that therefore purely symbolic characters indicate a flawed text. I would argue instead that Hardy is fully aware of the antirealistic nature of Dare and Power, and that he employs them successfully as melodramatically excessive examples of rigid embodiment, thus providing counterpoints to the fluid dis/embodiments of Paula and, to a lesser extent, Somerset. It may seem counterintuitive to associate De Stancy’s illegitimate son with rigidity, since his Mephistophelean ability to pop up here and there— when his father asks him where he has come from, Dare replies “ ‘From going to and fro in the earth, and walking up and down in it, as Satan said to his Maker’ ” (L 157–158)—and the difficulty people have assigning him an age—“the beholder’s first estimate of sixteen as his age was hastily corrected to six-and-twenty, and afterwards shifted hither and thither along intervening years” (L 54)—suggest instead an uncanny flexibility. And Dare’s skill at fraud reinforces his slippery nature and trickster status. Yet as the story proceeds it becomes clear that he verges on monomaniacal in his
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SENSATIONAL BODIES, MELODRAMATIC SPECTACLES
pursuit of regaining his family’s lost inheritance of Stancy Castle, whether he is in its legitimate line or not. To achieve his goal he is willing to exploit everyone around him, including his father, and to commit whatever crimes are necessary, which makes him the true melodramatic villain of the novel. And while there is no doubt that Dare has a financial interest in bringing about De Stancy’s marriage to Paula, since he would then have access to her fortune, this does not seem to be his most basic motive. When De Stancy declares he has no interest in meeting Paula, because he has taken a vow of celibacy “ ‘in regret for the wrong done’ ” (L 161) to Dare’s mother, and when he shows Dare the ring he wears to remind him of that promise, he receives the following response. Dare surveyed it, saying, “Yes, I have seen that before, though I never knew why you wore it. Well I wear a reminder also, but of a different kind.” He threw open his shirt-front, and revealed tattooed on his breast the letters DE STANCY . . . The captain rather winced at the sight. “Well, well,” he said hastily, “that’s enough.” (L 162)
Dare literally has the secret of his patrilineal identity inscribed on his body, and the permanence of that tattoo reveals his inescapable fixation on the wrong done to him by his unmarried mother and the father who will not acknowledge him. In other words, Dare has chosen to lock himself into a past that determines who and what he will be. The regaining of Stancy Castle through his plotting functions for Dare as a kind of surrogate legitimacy, but it is doubtful whether this substitution would be adequate even if it succeeded, since it seems to operate in the same way as his gambling mania—an effort to manipulate chance and randomness as an antidote to his own unchangeable fate as a bastard. Brooks says of melodramatic drives that they constitute “a condition of bodily writing, a condition in which the repressed affect is represented on the body,” so that they reveal to the audience “the maximal conversion of psychic affect into somatic meaning—meaning enacted on the body itself,”40 a description that is especially apposite for Dare. His mercurial behavior and series of cleverly illicit/illegal stratagems cloak his obsession with an identity that he resents and yet has indelibly written into his skin, so that merely removing his shirt exposes the single clue necessary to unlock all of his actions. Once again Deleuze helps us clarify what is being suggested, for in Dialogues II he and Claire Parnet assert that, far from subverting the established order, “the trickster claims to take possession of fixed properties, or to conquer a territory . . . The trickster has plenty of future, but no becoming whatsoever.”41 For all his skill with telegraphic and photographic technologies, Dare is trapped in a melodramatic mode of embodied being
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(not becoming) that, in its contrast with the provisional agency of Paula and Somerset, is Hardy’s way of symbolically exposing the insufficiency of inflexible identity in modern culture. And in an almost parodic example of faciality, Abner Power serves to double this message through the excessive representation of an even more embodied identity. The narrator’s sudden introduction of Paula’s uncle insists that being able to interpret his face will tell an observer all they need to know about his character. His visage, which was of the colour of light porphyry, had little of its original surface left; it was a face which had been the plaything of strange fires or pestilences, that had moulded to whatever shape they chose his originally supple skin, and left it pitted, puckered, and seamed like a dried watercourse . . . The face-marks had a meaning, for any one who could read them, beyond the mere suggestion of their origin; they signified that this man had either been the victim of some terrible necessity as regarded the occupation to which he had devoted himself, or that he was a man of dogged obstinacy, from sheer sang froid holding his ground amid malign forces when others would have fled affrighted away. (L 236)
As it turns out the marks on Power’s face signify both of the options provided by the narrator, since his past agreement to provide an explosive device to a “fraternity of political philosophers” (L 369) who use it in an assassination attempt reveals a “terrible necessity” in his “occupation,” while his willingness to return to England even though he is being pursued by both his former terrorist colleagues and the European police could certainly be described as “sheer sang froid.” The scars on his face are the result of a blast that occurred when Power was attempting to dispose of his bombmaking material and, as Dare notes during the confrontation that reveals all this, “ ‘[t]his accident, which was such a misfortune to him as a man, was an advantage to him as a conspirators’ engineer retiring from practice, and afforded him a disguise . . . which he has considered impenetrable, but which is getting seen through by one or two keen eyes as time goes on’ ” (L 371). Power’s scars, which temporarily hid his identity as a wanted criminal, are now the signs that ineradicably lock him into that identity; in Deleuze and Guattari’s terms his body has been fully “territorialized” by his face, which may lead to that body’s destruction since it cannot “become imperceptible . . . become clandestine.”42 Given all of this, it is unsurprising that Power states during his own attempt to blackmail Dare, by revealing his knowledge of the younger man’s illegitimacy, that “ ‘there’s no scarlet left in my face to blush for men’s follies’ ” (L 366). In a text that constructs blushing as a sign of potentiality and indeterminacy Power’s inability to
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SENSATIONAL BODIES, MELODRAMATIC SPECTACLES
do so, an inability he apparently shares with Dare, signifies why both will ultimately be defeated in “a story of to-day,” since their inscribed bodies cannot adapt to a surveillance regime that will eventually read and expose their secrets. This over-the-top scene, which sees Dare and Power conclude their efforts at mutual blackmail by threatening each other with drawn revolvers (L 371), is not a desperate attempt by Hardy to inject some drama into a flagging plot. Instead, its antirealist, melodramatic excess acts to symbolically demonstrate a failed mode of being. Dare manages to expel Power both from England and from the text, but he is merely foreshadowing the collapse of all his plots once De Stancy is forced to confess to Paula the nature of their relationship—the tattoo of his illegitimacy cannot ultimately be hidden any more successfully than can Power’s scarred faciality. While the use of such emblematic figures challenges audience expectations about how character functions within novelistic structures, it is fully consistent with this novel’s themes. And this holds true for another textual element that drew critical ire— the “delightful journey . . . to the shores of the Mediterranean” (L 253) upon which Paula embarks once the renovations to her castle begin. Usually described as an attempt by Hardy to spin out a novel that has lost its bearings, her expedition actually reinforces the technological theme. Paula’s train tourism symbolically reasserts the power upon which her agency rests, since it is her railway-magnate father’s fortune that allows her whatever autonomy she may achieve, at a particularly fraught moment. Somerset and De Stancy, driven by their increasingly intense rivalry, are more and more importunate in their insistence that she choose one of them over the other; but whoever she selects will by definition restrict and halt her becoming, instead edging her toward “being” a wife. The movement provided by the railway becomes a literal mode of evasion, which is reinforced by the sister technology of the telegraph. It is well to remember that the original purpose of telegraphy was to identify more accurately the location of train engines; these two forms of modernity were linked from the start. Paula’s suggestion that she and Somerset “ ‘can be near each other in spirit, when our bodies are far apart’ ” (L 253) is very much predicated on the idea that he “ ‘may write, or still better, telegraph, since the wire is so handy’ ” (L 255) during her absence, and indeed this later becomes a command from Paula: “ ‘I have resolved to communicate with you only by telegrams . . . Please reply by the same means only’ ” (L 271). This is Paula’s final attempt to reestablish the dis/embodiment that has served her so well to this point, and by employing the technologies that are her main advantage over her male pursuers, to flee the gender constraints that are inevitably closing around her. As Deleuze and Parnet put
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it, “[t]he great . . . error lies in thinking that line of flight consists in fleeing from life . . . On the contrary, to flee is to produce the real, to create life, to find a weapon.”43 In the end, however, Paula’s technological weapons are insufficient to overcome either the cultural determinants of her situation or the genre expectations of the novel in which she is placed, although Hardy does his best to ensure that his “predetermined cheerful ending” remains as ambiguous as possible. It is De Stancy’s ability to press his suit by following Paula on her journey that gives him the advantage over Somerset, since by placing his body and hers in constant proximity he creates a kind of assumed relationship, leading her to the rather grim observation that “ ‘a woman who gives a man an answer one shade less peremptory than a harsh negative may be carried beyond her intentions, and out of her own power, before she knows it’ ” (L 343—emphasis added). The Captain’s melodramatic use of a telegram announcing his father’s death manipulates Paula into finally accepting his proposal, an ironic turn of events since it is Paula’s discovery of Dare’s counterfeit telegram that breaks them apart on the very day appointed for their marriage. Forced to acknowledge his illegitimate son to avoid Dare’s arrest and prosecution, De Stancy’s confession is hardly sensational to the reader, who has known of the relationship for most of the book, but it is devastating enough for Paula: “She remained still as death while one might count ten; then she turned her back upon him. ‘I think you had better go away,’ she whispered. ‘You need not come again’ ” (L 390). The revelation is also, of course, liberating, since Paula is now free to pursue Somerset, which leads to a further irony as she uses the railway to chase after him to Budmouth and, after crossing the Channel, to chase him around southern France in order to provide him the opportunity to propose to her. This “coup d’audace to which she had committed herself ” (L 397), culminating in the declaration “ ‘if you want to marry as you once did, you must say so; for I am here to be asked’ ” (L 417), is the final expression of our heroine’s mixed agency. Once again employing the technology that empowers her, she takes an initiative that “ ‘is not the woman’s part’ ” (L 417) in order to fulfill her desire, but this fulfillment will also literally “dis-empower” her since after it is achieved she will no longer be Paula Power, but Paula Somerset. Jil Larson’s assertion that “[i]n Hardy, the characters who accept the impurity of their agency come closest to achieving wisdom and virtue”44 offers an appropriately qualified description of this novel’s main characters as they prepare to move forward together as a suitably disciplined, unmelodramatic couple. Dare’s final, sensational act of burning down Stancy Castle is literally the last flaring of a defeated excessiveness, and only serves (again literally) to clear the ground for the new dispensation.
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A LAODICEAN
SENSATIONAL BODIES, MELODRAMATIC SPECTACLES
A Laodicean ends by providing yet another echo of Far from the Madding Crowd, with the local worthies gathered at “the King’s Arms Inn, Markton” (L 419) commenting on Paula and Somerset’s marriage after the couple’s return to England, and insisting that they display themselves in the same way that Oak and Bathsheba were required to do: “By this time their arrival had become known, and a crowd soon gathered outside, acquiring audacity with continuance there. Raising a hurrah, the group would not leave till Somerset had showed himself on the balcony above; and then declined to go away till Paula also had appeared” (L 422). Like the earlier novel the eventual, publicly endorsed choice by the heroine of the “correct” suitor heralds the advent of a new expression of cultural power—one that has no place for the melodramatic elements that have been exorcised from its plot, even if the figure most obviously embodying those elements manages a last inflammatory gesture. But in this case Hardy allows himself a more direct expression of the ambivalence that is hinted at through Bathsheba’s silencing at the end of her marriage narrative. Here is the final conversation between Mr. and Mrs. George Somerset, the last lines of the book. “We will build a new house from the ground, eclectic in style. We will remove the ashes, charred wood, and so on from the ruin, and plant more ivy . . . You, Paula, will be yourself again, and recover, if you have not already, from the warp given to your mind (according to Woodwell) by the mediævalism of that place.” “And be a perfect representation of ‘the modern spirit’?” she inquired; “representing neither the senses and understanding, nor the heart and imagination; but what a finished writer calls ‘the imaginative reason’?” “Yes, for since it is rather in your line you may as well keep straight on.” “Very well, I’ll keep straight on; and we’ll build a new house beside the ruin, and show the modern spirit evermore . . . But, George, I wish—” And Paula repressed a sigh. “Well?” “I wish my castle wasn’t burnt; and I wish you were a De Stancy!” (L 431)
That Paula is given the last word, and that that word is an expression of dissatisfaction, suggests marriage has not fully erased the agency that has characterized her throughout the story, and the compromise entailed by matrimony is simply a different expression of the qualifications to autonomy she has always worked within. As a representative of “the modern spirit” she encompasses the fluctuating subjectivities of “becoming” that this spirit provides, along with the technologies that generate
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dis/embodiments aiding the expression of such potentialities. In this way Paula both recognizes and accepts the future. Yet her laodicean nature cannot help but recognize the mixed blessings that this future bestows, and through her concluding exclamation Hardy ensures that the reader is likewise left with mixed feelings about the dispensations of modernity.
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Melodramas of Modernity and Class Status—The Hand of Ethelberta and Jude the Obscure
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Part III
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“ ‘Lady—not a penny less than lady’ ”: Satire, Melodrama, and the Sensational Fiction of Class Status in The Hand of Ethelberta
H
ardy’s decision to provide a subtitle identifying The Hand of Ethelberta as a “Comedy in Chapters” ensured a critical concentration on genre that the author had cause to regret almost immediately. Leslie Stephen, already uncomfortable because the book seemed so different from Far from the Madding Crowd, the novel whose success had caused him to commit to this next work of fiction by Hardy, requested that the qualifying phrase be dropped for the novel’s serialization in the Cornhill Magazine, characteristically deflecting his commercial concerns onto a readership whose putative lack of sophistication required unfortunate indulgence: I am sorry to have to bother you about a trifle! I fully approved of your suggestion for adding to “Ethelberta’s Hand” the descriptive title “A Comedy in Chapters.” I find however from other people that it gives rather an unfortunate idea. They understand by Comedy something of the farce description, and expect you to be funny after the fashion . . . of some professional joker. This, of course, is stupid; but then, advertisements are meant for stupid people. The question is, unluckily, not what they ought to feel but what they do feel . . . When the book is reprinted it can of course appear, because then the illusion would be immediately dispelled.1
Hardy, however, appears to have been less sanguine than Stephen about the book’s ability to dispel potential misreadings, since he felt the need in the 1895 Preface for the Osgood, McIlvaine edition to declare that
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5
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the text “was given the sub-title of a comedy to indicate—though not quite accurately—the aim of the performance,” while in the postscript to that Preface, provided for the 1912 Wessex edition, he refines his own clarification by describing the novel as “more accurately, satire.”2 The establishment of just what precisely is being satirized would, therefore, seem of some importance, and a range of potential targets has subsequently been identified. George Wing, in his “ ‘Forbear, Hostler, Forbear!’: Social Satire in The Hand of Ethelberta,” defends his position that Hardy “is not normally radical in the political or social pamphleteer’s sense” by arguing for the broadest set of possibilities, concluding his article by insisting that in the book Hardy “can examine and present . . . those intrinsic ironies of man and his behaviour which are not solely the preserve of any one class: they bite, in general, into all human behaviours.”3 Robert Schweik argues along the same lines by suggesting that the novel’s most characteristic element is “its remarkably evenhanded ridicule of the foibles of members of all social classes and the amused detachment with which success is portioned out . . . a spirit of general derision, and a non-judgmental acceptance of enterprise and calculation in the acquisition of wealth by members of all classes.”4 Widdowson, combining an interpretation of social criticism with an analysis of literary form, suggests that “the relation between fictional and class reversals . . . may be said to represent the principal discourse of the novel,” so that Ethelberta acts “as an exposure of the shams . . . involved in the social (class and gender) relations of marriage . . . [and] is no more ‘unreal’ than the conventional fictional representation of courtship and marriage in novels contemporary with it. Its fictions simply do not purport to be ‘real’; and, in the process, it calls in question the ‘reality’ of those other social and fictional representations which do.”5 This approach may be said to look back toward Taylor, who asserts that “The Hand of Ethelberta is an exceptional ironic comedy of manners which satirises the accepted forms of fiction of the time as well as the social conventions which they report,”6 and ahead to Andrew Radford, who insists that the novel “is a highly self-conscious enterprise in which Hardy apes the hackwriter to expose the shallow fictions that were commissioned by the Cornhill and many middlebrow magazines . . . He manipulates a popular genre only to draw ironic attention to its dreary stock-in-trade: the wildly improbable plots, lame characterisations and stilted dialogue.”7 So, from a wide claim that Hardy is mocking all human behavior we move to an extremely specific literary satire aimed at the kind of stories published by the very magazine that serialized Hardy’s novel. Radford’s final damning list bears a striking resemblance to the kind of criticisms often leveled at sensation fiction. Is Hardy also satirizing melodrama and sensationalism, or is he once again using the sensational to advance a cultural critique, only this time
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through a more overtly manifested satirical method? Given that two out of Hardy’s first four novels are firmly committed to sensation fiction devices and the melodramatic mode, I would suggest that the second case is much more likely, which makes it necessary to reconsider the famous and oftenquoted declarations in the Life that with The Hand of Ethelberta the author decided “to make a plunge in a new and untried direction” by creating a text “which had nothing whatever in common with anything he had written before.”8 At a very basic modal level the “direction” of this fifth text is the opposite of “untried.” The foundational trope of sensation fiction is a secret that must (yet cannot) be kept, an element that The Hand of Ethelberta centralizes to an extent greater than either of the other two Novels of Ingenuity. Having now examined both Desperate Remedies and A Laodicean, I think it is clear that the shared aspect of the secrets in all three of these novels is the vulnerability and artificiality of class definition. Both Manston and Dare’s undisclosed illegitimate births leave their status ambiguous, while threatening the status security of their aristocratic parents, and both use blackmail (direct or implied) to advance their melodramatic machinations. But there is a further connection, in that the class status with which they wish to ally themselves is itself precarious. As already discussed, Miss Aldclyffe’s ability to enact her role as a lady depends on a fortuitous inheritance without which her family’s rank would have no meaning, while the impecunious De Stancy is reduced to scheming to marry Paula Power because his noble family has lost all of its land and wealth. Yet while the secret identities of Manston and Dare are crucial to the complex developments that define their novels’ narratives, these characters are ultimately secondary to Cytherea and Paula, the young women at the center of Hardy’s courtship plots who in their own way also illustrate the ambiguities of assigned social worth. With the character of Ethelberta Petherwin, however, Hardy combines the courtship plot with the volatile secret of class fluidity and places this unified narrative at the core of the text, a move that heightens the novel’s alignment with sensationalism even as it significantly reduces the need for melodramatic villains. As Loesberg puts it, “[i]n effect, sensation novels evoke their most typical moments of sensational response from images of a loss of class identity. And this common image links up with a fear of a general loss of social identity as a result of the merging of the classes.”9 The novel’s opening paragraph, with its apparently blasé narrative account of Ethelberta’s background, establishes the deep cultural anxiety that is going to be explored in detail by the story that follows, an anxiety that is initiated, not ostensibly resolved, by a courtship and marriage.
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THE HAND OF ETHELBERTA
MELODRAMAS OF MODERNITY AND CLASS STATUS
She was the daughter of a gentleman who lived in a large house not his own . . . She became a teacher in a school, was praised by examiners, admired by gentlemen, not admired by gentlewomen, was touched up with accomplishments by masters who were coaxed into painstaking by her many graces, and, entering a mansion as governess to the daughter thereof, was stealthily married by the son. He, a minor like herself, died from a chill caught during the wedding tour, and a few weeks later was followed into the grave by Sir Ralph Petherwin, his unforgiving father, who bequeathed his wealth to his wife absolutely . . . She took by the hand the forlorn Ethelberta—who seemed rather a detached bride than a widow— and finished her education by placing her for two or three years in a boarding-school at Bonn. Latterly she had brought the girl to England to live under her roof as daughter and companion, the condition attached being that Ethelberta was never openly to recognize her relations. (HE 1–2)
The daughter of a butler (who thus “lives in a large house not his own,” and to whom the word “gentleman” may only therefore be applied ironically), Ethelberta Chickerel moves through the levels of selfimprovement (teacher, governess) open to a young woman in her position, only to suddenly vault out of that position altogether by marrying into a knighthood. Then, as the newly widowed Ethelberta Petherwin, she receives the continental polish required for her to take her place as “daughter and companion” in an upper-class house, the price of this social elevation and new status identity being a coerced class deracination. But Ethelberta is not the only character willing and able to engage in such mimicry, as the aptly named maidservant Menlove demonstrates. At one point working in the Petherwin household, and then later in that of the Doncastles, she will play a significant role in the novel’s sensation fiction plot as an untrustworthy holder of Ethelberta’s secret. Perhaps more significantly, however, she also acts as an elaboration on its central theme. When Ethelberta’s fear of exposure causes her to ask Menlove whether she observed anyone following her, we are told that “[t]he lady’s-maid, thus suddenly pulled up in a night forage after lovers,” denies possessing any useful knowledge, a reply which was more apposite than her mistress suspected, considering that the speaker, after retiring from duty, had slipped down her dark skirt to reveal a light, puffed, and festooned one, put on a hat and feather, together with several pennyweights of metal in the form of rings, brooches, and earrings— all in the time whilst one could count a hundred—and enjoyed half-an-hour of prime courtship by an honourable young waiter of the town. (HE 12)
In her transformational ability to alter appearance during her overt trolling for potential husbands, Menlove, changing from respectable
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urban dress had become far more uniform, at least within the classes, while for those central mediators of class society, the servant population, clothing had, in some sense become a disguise . . . so that servants were more likely to wear their mistresses’ used garments or to purchase cheaper versions of them. Amidst these cultural shifts, people and places became, rather than knowable entities, inscrutable sites of mystery.10
And that Ethelberta can, in order to walk with her family in London, undergo the process in reverse, as it were, by putting on a dress “that was exactly that of a respectable workman’s relative who had no particular ambition in the matter of fashion—a black stuff gown, a plain bonnet to match” (HE 192), reinforces the disconcerting inability to determine cultural value by sight in the cityscape of Victorian England. The narrator will subsequently provide an expanded list of Menlove’s props, consisting of “a hat decked with feathers and flowers, a parasol, and a light muslin trainskirt, out of the pocket of the latter tumbling some long golden tresses of hair” (HE 233). This last item connects her with Jude the Obscure’s Arabella Donn, another skilful performer on the stage of the modern, as we shall see. But the key point is that the availability of such status “camouflage” was constructed as particularly threatening when made available to women, especially women who appeared in the public sphere. As Judith Walkowitz notes, “[a]lthough Victorians expected to see the vices and virtues of femininity ‘written on the body,’ confusions over identity frequently occurred. In the elegant shopping districts around Regent Street, prostitutes, dressed in ‘meretricious finery,’ could and did pass as respectable, while virtuous ladies wandering through the streets ‘window gazing at their leisure,’ often found themselves accosted as streetwalkers.”11 Although neither Ethelberta nor Menlove is a prostitute, they are both very much “on the market,” and Ethelberta in particular is going to take on publicly performed personas that place her uncomfortably, yet productively, on the margins of respectability. One way of viewing the text, then, is as a novel of imposture, and here Kimberley Reynolds and Nicole Humble’s description of sensationalism becomes even more specifically appropriate than Loesberg’s: “[t]he fears tapped by the sensation genre are those of the outsider within— the governess, the upper servant, even the trusted wife, who is not what she seems; . . . [due to]the intense insecurity of class and economic status that afflicted the Victorian bourgeoisie in their rapidly changing society.”12
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servant into fashionable bourgeoisie, illustrates the opportunities provided by modernity to modify social identity, a much less sophisticated, although telling, version of Ethelberta’s own situation. By this point in the nineteenth century
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Menlove’s later declaration that “ ‘[w]e are all independent here; no slavery for us; it is not as it is in the country where servants are considered to be of different blood and bone from their employees’ ” (HE 239) shows the danger posed to “natural” deference when the lower orders become adept at impersonating their betters. What Hardy satirically exposes in The Hand of Ethelberta, however, is that imposture is the defining trait of all cultivated society, from top to bottom, so that the heroine’s sensational secret ends up being representative of the inauthentic world she works so hard to infiltrate. Ethelberta’s emergence from the inn at which she and her mother-in-law are staying provokes an exchange between the milkman and the hostler that comically dramatizes the issue in a way typical of Hardy, with his plebeian characters commenting irreverently but acutely on their betters. “Now, if a poor needy feller like myself could only catch her alone when she’s dressed up to the nines for some grand party, and carry her off to some lonely place—sakes, what a pot of jewels and goold things I warrant he’d find about her! ’Twould pay en for his trouble.” “I don’t dispute the picter; but ’tis sly and untimely to think such roguery. Though I’ve had thoughts like it, ’tis true, about high women—Lord forgive me for’t.” “And that figure of fashion standing there is a widow woman, so I hear?” “Lady—not a penny less than lady. Ay, a thing of twenty-one or thereabouts.” “A widow lady and twenty-one. ’Tis a backward age for a body who’s so forward in her state of life.” (HE 3)
The milkman’s identification of Ethelberta as a “widow woman” is corrected by the hostler’s insistence that she is “not a penny less than lady,” echoing the woman/lady distinction Miss Aldclyffe insisted be applied to her in Desperate Remedies, and reinforcing the same uncomfortable truth. Wealth provides the appurtenances of status, and if they make it impossible to tell whether the “figure of fashion” standing in front of you is a former schoolteacher or a well-born lady, then class status is manifestly performative and fluctuating, not inherent and permanent. Of course it is possible to argue that these two characters cannot recognize the “real thing” because their lower-class positions provide no point of comparison but, as the rest of the novel demonstrates, none of the upper-class characters can tell the difference either. This is partly because Ethelberta is a quick-thinking and consummate performer, but it is also because the secret of status performance must remain unperceived especially by those who rely on its invisibility for their own cultural capital.
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Since practically every character Ethelberta encounters turns out to be playing some false role or other, the last thing any of them can afford to do is acknowledge their own mendacity through a confrontation with hers. Ethelberta worries that the exposure of her secret will cause her to be rejected because she does not belong in the social circles through which she moves, but the deeper threat she poses, one that would absolutely require her expulsion, is her revelation of the fictionality of those same social circles. Widdowson’s suggestion that “the crucial problematic of Hardy’s fiction (in Ethelberta, but also in most of the later novels) would seem to lie precisely in his attempts to find a form to ‘render visible’ abstract and analytic ‘essences’ of contemporary social relations”13 has its answer in Cvetkovich’s observation that “[s]ensationalism . . . produces the embodiment, in both the literal and figurative senses, of social structures. It . . . renders them concrete, by embodying them in a single and powerful representation.”14 Hardy uses the sensation novel’s central device of secrecy to both organize and thematicize his mocking exposure of status identity by reifying it in Ethelberta. This strategy provides another example of the way in which sensationalism’s generic eclecticism perfectly suits his rhetorical purposes, as the text’s evocation of its main character through a combination of comedy of manners and courtship novel conventions, and a blending of satire, farce, and melodrama, disrupts the reading experience of its audience in order to help disrupt its class and cultural complacency. Because Ethelberta is an embodiment of sensationalism, the novel does not provide explicit sensation scenes so much as it simply tracks her sensational actions. The first of these, her publication of a collection of poems entitled “Metres by E” (HE 17), foreshadows her methods, their results, and their possible repercussions. Obviously the title itself is a provocation, its single initial providing a taunting invitation to solve the mystery of the author’s identity. This urge to both reveal and conceal is characteristic of Ethelberta’s daring and mocking approach to her situation, since the poems consist of a collection of soft and marvellously musical rhymes, of a nature known as the vers de société. The lines presented a series of playful defences of the supposed strategy of womankind in fascination, courtship, and marriage— the whole teeming with ideas bright as mirrors and just as insubstantial, yet forming a brilliant argument to justify the ways of girls to men. (HE 19)
In other words, the poetry illustrates that the roles Ethelberta and other women are forced to play in a culture that evaluates them primarily through their ability to attract men, and in doing so justifies this “supposed strategy” by demonstrating that “girls” are left with no other choice
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if they want to succeed socially. In this way the novel’s heroine “exposes the spurious truth of sexual identity, blatantly revealing through the publication of her own subjugated knowledge the material determinants of female subjectivity,”15 and her self-reflexive ability to perform, through her verse, the roles she has herself observed and enacted, reveals the secret of her own dissatisfaction. This is reinforced by the narrator’s comment on the overall effect of the volume, since “[t]he pervading characteristic of the mass was the means of forcing into notice, by strangeness of contrast, the single mournful poem that the book contained. It was placed at the very end, and under the title of ‘Cancelled Words’ formed a whimsical and rather affecting love-lament” (HE 19). The brittle artificiality of the world of the earlier poems leads to the emotional authenticity of the concluding one, whose title discloses the difficulty of sharing honest sentiments in a society of shams. Ethelberta then doubles the provocation of the verses by anonymously sending the volume to Christopher Julian, the young man who courted her when she was still a governess, and who is the inspiration for the collection’s final poem. Through this apparent invitation to renewed dalliance Hardy suggests a flirtatious forwardness and aggressive unconventionality in his heroine. Predictably, the collection itself becomes a sensation, and the reader is told that at “a friendly dinner-party at the house of a gentleman called Doncastle . . . The conversation [is] chiefly about a volume of musical, tender, and humorous rhapsodies lately issued to the world in the guise of verse, which had been reviewed and talked about everywhere” (HE 53). This set piece generates one of the text’s numerous satirical presentations of the feckless conversation to be had in not-quite-fashionable London salons, but the speculation about the poetess is more significant. The dinner hostess observes, “ ‘I am sure, when I was at the ardent age . . . I could no more have printed such emotions and made them public than I—could have helped privately feeling them,’ ” which causes one of her guests to respond “ ‘I wonder if she has gone through half she says? If so, what an experience!’ ” (HE 57). Ethelberta’s impropriety is assured, since the public expression of the ideas and emotions represented in her verse is itself a breach of decorum, while the character of a woman who might have actually lived what is described is by definition dubious. Lady Petherwin certainly believes this, since upon discovering that her daughter-in-law has written “those ribald verses” she delivers the following judgment: “ ‘Really, one would imagine that women wrote their books during those dreams in which people have no moral sense, to see how improper some, even virtuous, ladies become when they get into print!’ ” (HE 84). This is precisely the kind of criticism aimed at Braddon, Ellen Wood, Rhoda Broughton, and other female sensation writers, making Ethelberta as much a sensation
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“O no—no harm. But I cannot explain to you—unless you see it partly of your own accord—that to write them she must be rather a fast lady—not a bad fast lady; a nice fast lady, I mean, of course. There, I have said it now, and I daresay you are vexed with me, for your interest in her has deepened to what it originally was, I think. I don’t mean any absolute harm by “fast”, Kit.” (HE 66)
Faith’s repeated use of the epithet “fast,” despite her quaintly ineffective efforts to mitigate its negative implications, links Ethelberta with sensationalism since it was the period’s word of choice to describe the inappropriate femininity of the questionable young women who appeared in, and read, sensation novels, as these two stanzas from a verse published in Punch near the beginning of the sensation fiction debate reveal: We are not to be hooked in, Fast young ladies; I require a chap with tin, Fast young ladies. Love is humbug; cash the chief Article in my belief: All poor matches come to grief, Fast young ladies Not to marry is my plan, Fast young ladies, Any but a wealthy man, Fast young ladies. Bother that romance and stuff! She who likes it is a muff, We are better up to snuff, Fast young ladies.16
For Punch this mercenary bent is clearly anomalous and unladylike, but Hardy’s “fast” heroine’s eventual commitment to a wealthy and culturally prestigious marriage places her squarely within the discourse of a society that is calculating advantage all the time. It is a measure of the success of Hardy’s satire that, through causing the reader to identify and sympathize
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author as she is a sensation character, something the text will later confirm. In Victorian terms her character is summed up neatly when Julian asks his sister Faith what she thinks of the poems. His leading comment that “ ‘[t]here is no harm in them’ ” does not produce the response he was hoping for:
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with Ethelberta, he takes this negative stereotype and turns it into an instrument for his own social commentary. Schweik argues that “[c]lass pretension and class pride—on all levels— is an object of satire in The Hand of Ethelberta, but the kind of social mobility that comes of achieved wealth is not,”17 and although this implies a somewhat too optimistic reading of the text’s attitude toward pursuing the main chance, it does draw attention to how the novel attacks a gender hypocrisy that faults young women for getting ahead in ways that it allows to men. The character Alfred Neigh, “ ‘a terrible hater of women . . . particularly of the lower class,’ ” comes from a family “ ‘that have made a very large fortune by the knacker business and tanning’ ” (HE 201), but that does not inhibit his acceptance as a gentleman, or indeed his eventual proposal to Ethelberta, which is accompanied by the (ironic) declaration that “ ‘directly I saw you I felt that nobody ever came so near my idea of what is desirable in a lady’ ” (HE 204). The unfairness of his social acceptance in contrast to Ethelberta’s vulnerability is made clear when she refuses the command of her mother-in-law to suppress her poems, which leads Lady Petherwin to the melodramatic step of burning her will, thus destroying any hope of a financially independent future for Ethelberta. Because a woman has virtually no other method of ensuring her social status than “winning” a husband, she is reliant on others in ways that men are not, and Hardy suggests that this necessity justifies his heroine’s stratagems even as they reveal the shallowness of those upon whom she practices them. Thus at her moment of crisis, immediately preceding the discovery of her authorship and the consequent estrangement from her mother-in-law, Ethelberta’s situation is completely misread by those for whom she is merely a passing piece of gossip. “Did you know anything of Mrs Petherwin until her name leaked out in connection with these ballads?” “No; but I think I recollect seeing her once before. She is one of those people who are known, as one may say, by subscription: everybody knows a little, till she is astonishingly well known altogether; but nobody knows her entirely . . . Lady Petherwin, her mother-in-law, has been taking her about a great deal lately.” “She has apparently a very good prospect.” “Yes; and it is through her being of that curious undefined character which interprets itself to each admirer as whatever he would like to have it. Old men like her because she is so girlish; youths because she is womanly; wicked men because she is good in their eyes; good men because she is wicked in theirs . . . ”
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In this conversation, both women fail to recognize that Ethelberta’s prospects are far from “good,” and her position is at this point the opposite of “happy;” this is Hardy’s way of revealing the imperceptiveness of this cultural stratum. Able only to recognize and read the surface signs that appear to indicate Ethelberta’s social success, they are uninterested in exploring any deeper, a tendency that the novel’s heroine depends upon, but that the novel itself mocks. In designating Ethelberta a “spectacle,” however, they inadvertently identify precisely the tactic she will next employ to deal with her current disadvantage. Upon the death of Lady Petherwin, Ethelberta is left with “nothing but the fag-end of the lease of the town-house and the furniture in it” (HE 102), so she must find a method of supporting herself, and the way she chooses is to push her experience as a risqué writer even further. Having composed a series of three first-person sensation stories (the one that Julian overhears her practicing involves cross-dressing and attempted rape), she intends to adopt the role of a “ ‘professed romancer’ ” and “ ‘tell [her] tales before a London public’ ” (HE 104). Ethelberta’s choice of oral performance over authorship is motivated by her insight that “ ‘tales of the weird kind were made to be told, not written’ ” (HE 104), and this, along with her decision to enter the world of public storytelling, is a conscious construction of herself as a spectacle on display. The result is a movement into the melodramatic mode, whose focus on the oral, the communal, and the spectacular has been outlined in previous chapters. The sensationalism of her poetry is magnified into the melodrama of her prose by a shared characteristic—the frisson achieved through her reader/audience’s uncertainty about whether Ethelberta has actually experienced what she is describing. The secrecy of the mysteriously abstract initial “E” having been replaced by the very real (and very attractive) young woman prominently exposed on the platform increases the impact of the narrative, provoking just the type of intense engagement for which Ethelberta hopes, and which successful melodrama delivers. Nonetheless, in some ways this is a very peculiar expression of the melodramatic mode. When Ethelberta tells Julian she has “ ‘decided to appear in public,’ ” and he responds “ ‘Not on the stage?’ ” she replies “ ‘Certainly not on the stage. There is no novelty in a poor lady turning actress, and novelty is what I want’ ” (HE 103). So this is “unstaged” melodrama, created without elaborate effects or indeed any theatrical props, including other actors. Further, “Ethelberta’s plan was to tell her pretended history and adventures while sitting in a chair—as if
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“These poems must have set her up. She appears to be quite the correct spectacle. Happy Mrs Petherwin!” (HE 76–77)
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she were at her own fireside, surrounded by a circle of friends . . . When she reached the most telling passages, instead of adding exaggerated action and sound, Ethelberta would lapse to a whisper, and a sustained stillness, which were more striking than gesticulation” (HE 120–121). Melodrama presented as domestic intimacy and without excess almost seems to necessitate some type of descriptive paradox: unmelodramatic melodrama. Yet there is no doubt that “as a new sensation” (HE 124) Ethelberta has created a spectacle the public is eager to see. The answer to these apparent contradictions is found in the comments from one of the “weekly reviews” (HE 124), provided by the narrator, that responds to Ethelberta’s first performance. “A handsome woman . . . may have her own reasons for causing the flesh of the London public to creep upon its bones by her undoubtedly remarkable narrative powers; but we question if much good can result from such a form of entertainment. Nevertheless, some praise is due. We have had the novel-writer among us for some time, and the novel-reader has occasionally appeared on our platforms; but we believe that this is the first instance of a Novel-teller—one, that is to say, who relates professedly as fiction a romantic tale which has never been printed—the whole owing its chief interest to the method whereby the teller identifies herself with the leading character in the story.” (HE 124–125)
Ethelberta achieves the externally embodied, communal, visceral response of melodrama through a hybridization with the internally sublimated, atomized, psychological affect of the novel, a kind of performance art that is both “about” her and not about her at the same time. This house-ofmirrors effect is reinforced by her holding one tale in reserve: “ ‘the tale of my own life—to be played as a last card’ ” (HE 104). Having presented a series of fictions that identify her “with the leading character” in her stories, Ethelberta is prepared at the end to perform the story in which she actually is the main character, and which reveals that she has been acting a part underneath her other performances all along. At this point we might wonder just what the phrase “acting a part” means in this text, since role playing constitutes the entirety of Ethelberta’s identity. Her deliberate self-fragmentation provides the protean, although risky, opportunity for status movement, the cost being a fear of exposure that necessitates constant self-monitoring, extending to the rest of her family as well. The novel’s eponymous character lacks a unified personality, so that Widdowson observes “[t]o discuss Ethelberta as ‘a character’ at all is difficult . . . She is fashioned by circumstance, and is constituted by the social roles consequent on it,”18 while Tim Dolin asserts that “[t]here is
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no private, unified, autonomous Ethelberta, only a reflex of desires and conventions of the packed houses she performs in.”19 For those who prefer the internalized complexities of the realist mode this is the text’s signal failure, in that its focus on social surfaces refuses to even gesture toward realism’s concern with psychological evolution. By this point, however, we should be comfortable with the thought that Hardy’s refusal to limit himself to this aesthetic is based on choice, not inability, and his structural decisions are perfectly congruent with his aims. Hadley insists that “[i]n a melodramatic scenario, characters are not split personalities, private selves with public appearances; they are entirely social beings,” and “[u]ltimately, then, melodrama situates law and morality in a public space inhabited by social . . . relationships rather than within the private spaces of individuals . . . [t]he public sphere itself, defined by social feeling . . . is both the site and origin of melodrama’s powerful operation,”20 and her comments illustrate why Ethelberta and the melodramatic mode serves Hardy’s satirical purpose so well. As a completely social construct, whose refined awareness nonetheless allows her to adapt her sensational persona(s) as required to meet her changing needs, Ethelberta is the perfect reflector of her cultural moment, and Taylor is completely correct in identifying her as “the first of the moderns”21 in Hardy’s fiction. In Chapter 3, I argued that Hardy’s use of spectacle and melodrama in Far from the Madding Crowd suggests a possible, if limited, resistance to modern internalized disciplinary power and clandestine surveillance, through their attachment to excess and shared engagement in group experience. The Hand of Ethelberta, however, with its heroine’s chosen method of individuated self-spectacle and modified melodrama, reinforces the inevitability of the modern condition, suggesting that this novel is not so much taking a new and untried direction as providing a thematic fulfillment of the one that preceded it. Having arranged a panoptical situation for herself Ethelberta is in a position to manipulate the assumptions of her viewers in ways that undercut established cultural power, since their fixated gazes allow her to accrue influence of her own. The text displays this process most obviously in Lord Mountclere’s willingness to cut down half-a-dozen elms he had planted on his estate as a boy, merely to indulge Ethelberta’s passing observation that they block a view to the sea. As she watches the trees fall, we are told that she has “a sudden realization of vague things hitherto dreamed of from a distance only—a sense of novel power put into her hands without request or expectation” (HE 271), and that “[t]he enjoyment of power in a new element . . . held Ethelberta to the spot” (HE 271). In The Society of the Spectacle Thesis 23, Debord argues that in contemporary culture “[a]t the root of the spectacle lies the oldest of social divisions of labour, the specialization of power. The specialized
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role played by the spectacle is that of spokesman for all other activities, a sort of diplomatic representative of hierarchical society at its own court, and the source of the only discourse which that society allows itself to hear.”22 Ethelberta’s presentation of herself as a spectacle within this discourse both challenges status quo assumptions, in that a servant’s daughter has positioned herself to gain power, while at the same time confirming society’s values, since her goal is to find a secure place inside those parameters. This once again confirms the artificial performativity of Victorian status hierarchies, and the satirical critique produced by the text is emphasized by her sensational success in generating not one, but four, marriage proposals. As is often the case in nineteenth-century fiction, a female character’s choice of husband is the equivalent of a choice of identity, since it signifies the options available to her not just on the marriage market but in the life after the ceremony. Ethelberta is very well aware of this, and Hardy’s decision to give her such a multiplicity of choices is partly a jibe at a novelistic convention, which will produce the text’s most farcical moment, but is also a hint at the possibilities for self-fashioning available to his heroine. A love-match with Julian is the romantically clichéd outcome a conventional reader might expect, but her projection of what such a liaison would consist of, as she confronts his drop in status from leisured gentleman to struggling musician, is hardly welcoming: she might join for good and all the easy-going low, by plunging back to the level of her family, giving up all ambition for them, settling as the wife of a provincial music-master named Julian, with a little shop of fiddles and flutes, a couple of old pianos, a few sheets of stale music pinned to a string, and a narrow back parlour wherein she would wait for the phenomenon of a customer. (HE 312)
To characterize this as lukewarm would be an understatement, since it clearly rejects the constrictions on experience and agency that a marriage to Julian would impose on Ethelberta, and although she is “almost frightened at herself ” in being able to think of matrimony in this “cool and cynical spirit” (HE 312), the use of free indirect discourse suggests at least a partial narrative validation of her uneasiness at this grimy vision. And Ethelberta’s two “middle-class” suitors are scarcely improvements. The painter Eustace Ladywell, whose representative last name is reinforced by Julian’s (admittedly biased) description of him as a “ ‘perfumed piece of a man’ ” with “ ‘high eyebrows arched like a girl’s’ ” (HE 38), evinces an effeminacy that prevents Hardy’s heroine from ever seriously considering him as a possible husband, so that after his semi-incoherent declaration of devotion
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she is able to dismiss him as “ ‘a mere Mr Ladywell: a painter of good family . . . He is a dreadful simpleton’ ” (HE 150). To join with Ladywell would require Ethelberta to be a simpleton herself, and that she most definitely is not. Her response to Neigh’s attentions is more complex, however. While visiting the Royal Academy to view the painting Ladywell has on display, which Ethelberta modelled for and which therefore provides another example of her role as spectacle since a “throng” surrounds it (HE 193), Ethelberta overhears a conversation in which one of Neigh’s friends reports his announcement that “ ‘I mean to marry that lady . . . I will have her if there are a hundred at her heels’ ” (HE 193–194). We are then told that Neigh’s “presumption in uttering such a remark . . . nearly took her breath away,” a reaction followed by the sardonic comment that “[p]erhaps it was not altogether disagreeable to have her breath so taken away” (HE 194). Although she is “quite free from any digested plan for encouraging Neigh in his resolve to wive” (HE 198), he has enough appeal that Ethelberta believes she should investigate his estate at Farnfield, since it would be “curious, interesting, and almost necessary information to her who must become mistress of it were she to allow him to carry out his singularly cool and crude, if tender, intention” (HE 196). This movement toward a crass, premeditated self-interest indicates a shift in Ethelberta’s character that the text marks by providing its closest approximation to a sensation scene so far. Ethelberta and her sister Picotee’s trip to Farnfield Park is prefaced by a narrative comment identifying “the abnormal, almost morbid, development of the passion for position in present day society” (HE 198), a pathologizing of the pursuit of class status that the characters’ subsequent experience acts to embody. The two sisters’ first encounters with Neigh’s putative estate seem positive enough, since they come to “an ornamental gate with a curved sweep of wall on each side,” which Ethelberta perceives as a “very respectable beginning” (HE 198). Having gained entrance, and having proceeded down an “avenue of young fir trees,” the park’s carriageway then sweeps around a large lake and they can “hear from somewhere on the margin the purl of a weir, and around were clumps of shrubs,” so that “Ethelberta could not resist being charmed with the repose of the spot” (HE 199). But when she hurries to where she expects to find the manor house, she encounters something very different. Because the whole scene is shrouded in mist, Hardy is able to shock his characters at the same time he shocks his readers, so that the discovery of “a rough rail fence” enclosing “numerous horses in the last stage of decrepitude, the animals being such mere skeletons that at first Ethelberta hardly recognized them to be horses at all” (HE 199), is as disconcerting to us as it is to her. The prospect then shifts into something very like gothic grotesquerie, with the
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sawn off at the points where they began to be flexible Each torso was not unlike a huge hat-stand, and suspended to the pegs and prongs were lumps of some substance [that] . . . proved to be a chronological sequel to the previous scene. Horses’ skulls, ribs, quarters, legs, and other joints were hung thereon, the whole forming a huge open-air larder emitting not too sweet a smell. (HE 199–200)
The mystery of this surreal landscape is solved with the outbreak of the “Stygian sound” of baying dogs, which leads to Ethelberta’s recognition that they are “ ‘close to a kennel of hounds . . . These poor horses are waiting to be killed for their food’ ” (HE 200). Here, then, is the unmentionable source of Neigh’s standing as a gentleman, his name, like Ladywell’s, representing his inadequacy as a suitor, since it replicates both the neighing of the horses whose butchering produces his family’s wealth and the “nay” that is Ethelberta’s answer to him as a potential husband, “so horrid did his belongings appear to be” (HE 200). The scene is sensational because of the horrible excess of its revelation—the supremely self-confident London clubman’s gentility rests upon the dismembered bodies of broken-down nags. This revelation makes Ethelberta’s background, with her respectable butler-father and hardworking brothers and sisters, appear at least as likely to produce a lady as Neigh’s is to produce a gentleman, so the “not too sweet a smell” emanating from the open air abattoir of Farnfield Park is also the odor of unmerited snobbery and hypocritical class exclusionism. Hardy uses this vignette to mock the pretensions of his middle-class audience, many of whose social aspirations rest on similarly problematic foundations, but it also shows the reader how Ethelberta is increasingly part of this system of evaluation. Although part of her rejection of Neigh is based on disgust at this discovery, another part is much more calculating, for “this evening suggested to Ethelberta that herself and Neigh were too nearly cattle of one colour for a confession on the matter of lineage to be well received by him,” and that “[t]he sympathy of unlikeness might lead the scion of some family, hollow and fungous with antiquity . . . to be won over by her story; but the antipathy of resemblance would be ineradicable” (HE 201). It therefore becomes significant that the hounds in the kennel belong to “the Honourable Mr Mountclere, a brother of Lord Mountclere’s” (HE 201), since, although she does not yet know it, Ethelberta is about to acquire yet another, more “eligible” suitor, whose estate appears very different from the one she has just surveyed, and to whom the adjectives “hollow” and “fungous” may be applied in a way that
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is less comfortable for either her or the reader. Nonetheless, the narrator’s reporting of her thoughts shows that Ethelberta is increasingly prepared to entertain whatever options are available to achieve the status she more and more sees as necessary for social and financial security. Picotee, however, is less open to the possibilities that might arise. Having arranged for her sister to observe her at a formal dinner, Ethelberta is put on the defensive by her observations, starting with her younger sibling’s first question. “I expect you got to know the lord you were to meet?” “O yes—Lord Mountclere.” “And it’s dreadful how fond he is of you—quite ridiculously taken up with you—I saw that well enough. Such an old man, too; I wouldn’t have him for the world!” “Don’t jump at conclusions so absurdly, Picotee. Why wouldn’t you have him for the world?” “Because he is old enough to be my grandfather, and yours too.” “Indeed he is not; he is only middle-aged.” “O Berta! Sixty-five at least.” “He may or may not be that; and if he is, it is not old. He is so entertaining that one forgets all about age in connection with him.” “He laughs like this—‘Hee-hee-hee!’ ” Picotee introduced as much antiquity into her face as she could by screwing it up and suiting the action to the word. (HE 249)
Mountclere’s subsequent pursuit of Ethelberta reproduces a version of the melodramatic plot in which a dissipated nobleman pursues a virtuous and helpless serving-girl; yet, while there can be no doubt about his dissipation, by this point in the novel it is obvious that Ethelberta is far from helpless. Picotee’s distaste, therefore, reflects the standard audience response to a narrative whose usual conclusion sees the upper-class villain defeated by his virtuous lower-class rival, that defeat being symbolized by the heroine’s marriage to her worthy and faithful plebeian suitor. Hardy has already employed something like this structure in both Desperate Remedies and Far from the Madding Crowd, and it is for this reason that we need to be careful about agreeing with Widdowson and others that what is being presented in The Hand of Ethelberta is a “caricatured melodramatic fiction.”23 In keeping with its satirical purpose, the novel certainly presents an ironic reversal of reader expectations, but it does not mock the form itself. Instead,
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Hardy incorporates several ironically modified conventions of melodrama to resolve a narrative critique of the cultural conventions of status identity and the artificiality of the relationships they produce. Having said that, there can be little doubt that what attracts Mountclere to Ethelberta is her inclusion in that group of women “who have made themselves remarkable by their originality . . . as a person freed of her hampering and inconvenient sex, and, by virtue of her popularity, unfettered from the conventionalities of manner prescribed by custom for household womankind” (HE 262). Her self-construction as spectacle has, to this extent, worked perfectly, because it has created the kind of fame/notoriety that brings her to the attention of a wider circle of potential husbands. That this circle now includes Mountclere is entirely appropriate, since as the most melodrama-derived, and jaded, character in the text it makes generic sense that he would be attracted to the spectacular. The foundation of that spectacle, and his response to it, is Ethelberta’s putative status—the novelty of a lady who is willing to tell risqué stories in public— and it is this social designation that keeps the viscount polite. However, when Mountclere discovers the secret of Ethelberta’s background, which is told to him by his valet who heard it from Menlove, the courtship plot develops the potential for a different and darker resolution. Mountclere may continue, on one level, to admire Ethelberta, but his intentions shift significantly. “A clever little puss, to hoodwink us all like this—hee-hee!—” he murmured. “Her education—how finished; and her beauty—so seldom that I meet with such a woman. Cut down my elms to please a butler’s daughter—what a joke—certainly a good joke! To interest me in her on the right side instead of the wrong was strange. But it can be made to change sides—hee-hee!—it can be made to change sides!” (HE 276)
Fisher is partially correct in his assertion that “Lord Mountclere does not abandon Ethelberta when he learns her true history; on the contrary, he accelerates his attempts to marry her. His erotic response increases when he knows that she is really a servant.”24 Certainly his “erotic response” is increased, but what he intends to accelerate is not marriage. Mountclere’s new interest in Ethelberta, now on the “wrong” side, finds expression in their very next meeting, where “she had instantly fancied when the viscount was speaking to her that there were signs of some departure from his former respectful manner towards her . . . At their earlier meetings he had never ventured upon a distinct coupling of himself and herself as he had done in his broad compliment to-day—if compliment it could be called” (HE 285). Like Walkowitz’s streetwalkers in their “meretricious
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finery” Ethelberta is now, in Mountclere’s estimation, a very different kind of public woman, and the text seems poised to offer a narrative of sexual blackmail fully congruent with its melodramatic, aristocratic villain. But the novel’s heroine is not congruent with her vulnerable melodramatic counterparts, as the possessor of her sensational secret soon finds out. Mountclere’s return to thinking highly of Ethelberta is initiated by his discovery that he has a rival in Neigh, which leads him to speak “in somewhat agitated tones, and with what appeared to be a renewal of the respect” (HE 298) that had disappeared during their preceding conversations. Her change back from a servant-class candidate for coercion/seduction to the potential wife of a gentleman awakens his competitiveness: “ ‘Upon my life I’ve a good mind! Upon my life I have! . . . I must make a straightforward thing of it, and at once; or he will have her. But he shall not, and I will—hee-hee!’ ” (HE 299). Mountclere’s shifting perspective on Ethelberta suggests the ways in which status value may be assigned or unassigned based on completely arbitrary contingencies. His competition is rendered ridiculous by both Ladywell and Neigh appearing on the scene to press their suits, so that, at one point, Ethelberta has all three of her lovers in different rooms of her aunt’s house in Rouen, the (literal) French farce aspect of the situation being reinforced by the two younger men sticking their heads out of their respective windows, observing each other, and then inadvertently watching as Mountclere makes his proposal to her. Hardy’s mockery of the “worth” of Ethelberta’s hand to these various men, only one of whom knows anything about her beyond her performative self, and even he possessing no detailed knowledge of her situation, reinforces the satire aimed at this society’s shallow values, and exposes in particular its commodification of women, who, whether “low” or “high,” act as objects for patriarchal pursuit and consumption. As Penny Boumelha puts it, “the conscious exercise of either the ‘private’ vocation of marriage or the ‘public’ vocation of career makes a woman tantamount to a prostitute. In such circumstances, Ethelberta’s marital careerism appears less perverse than rational.”25 By this point in the novel Ethelberta has generated as much autonomy and agency as she is able to, but she cannot, nor does she desire to, step completely outside this cultural nexus, which leads to her ambivalent triumph when next she meets her elderly devotee. Mountclere’s invitation for Ethelberta to visit his estate at Enckworth Court is another of Hardy’s characteristic parallel scenes. Just as her clandestine trip to Farnfield Park was revelatory about its owner, so is her more official experience of Enckworth. The reader is first informed that Mountclere’s manor house, “in its main part, had not been standing more than a hundred years,” and that “[t]he modern portion had been planned
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with such total disregard of association, that the very rudeness of the contrast gave an interest to the mass which it might have wanted had perfect harmony been attempted between the nucleus and its adjuncts” (HE 328–329). This juxtaposition of the contemporary and the ancient foreshadows Ethelberta’s relationship with the viscount. Her modern skill at self-fashioning will, despite the “rudeness of contrast” and the lack of “perfect harmony” between them, produce a regenerative juxtaposition with his aged degeneration. This is not to say, however, that the text fully endorses the pairing. Ethelberta, contemplating the “principle staircase” of the hall, “hanging so airily there, to all appearance supported on nothing,” exclaims “ ‘How lovely! . . . His staircase alone is worth my hand!’ ” (HE 329), demonstrating her understanding that it is time to receive the best price for herself that she can. The narrator’s observation that “[t]he art which produced this illusion was questionable, but its success was undoubted” neatly encapsulates the ambivalence of this moment in his heroine’s story, which is reinforced by his subsequent observation that “[w]ithout attempting to trace an analogy between a man and his mansion, it may be stated that everything here, though so dignified and magnificent, was not conceived in quite the true and eternal spirit of art” (HE 329). Having planted in the reader’s mind what he claims he wishes to avoid (that there is in fact an analogy between Mountclere and his mansion), the narrator goes on to inform us that “those massive blocks of red-veined marble lining the hall . . . were cunning imitations in paint and plaster,” that the “dark green columns and pilasters corresponding were brick at the core,” and that “the external walls, apparently of massive and solid freestone, were only veneered with that material, being, like the pillars of brick within” (HE 329–330). The modern section of Mountclere’s house is itself an imposture, which not only implies that its owner has his own secrets to maintain, and that its potential future mistress will fit very well in a setting that is essentially performance, but also that Mountclere’s Victorian gentility is as fake as Neigh’s, whatever his superior lineage suggests. Neigh’s weakness is that he is not distant enough yet, either physically or temporally, from the economic source of his status at Farnfield Park, so that his façade may easily be breached by a simple railroad trip outside of London. Mountclere’s false front at Enckworth Court is more difficult to penetrate by the novel’s characters, because it is longer established, but it is fully exposed to the reader, and this folding together of the social hierarchy means that he “appears as the grotesque exposé of the basic premise of a class system: that it must disguise its artificiality and perpetuate the illusion of being natural.”26 Manor houses in sensation fiction often harbor dark secrets, but the secret exposed here is the constructed fictionality of not just the building itself, but of the discourse upon which it relies.
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It is, therefore, fully appropriate that Ethelberta brings her current crisis to a head, and at least for the moment gets everything in “hand” once again, through a daring and complex performance of the truth. When one of Mountclere’s guests calls on her to tell a story, “since nobody present, except Lord Mountclere, had ever heard one from her lips” (HE 332), she decides to “show herself as she really [is] . . . and so get rid of that self-reproach which had by this time reached a morbid pitch” (HE 332). Ethelberta’s decision to tell the story of her own life, the tale she has been holding in reserve, is honest yet strategic. On one hand, by presenting it as a fiction she continues to shield herself from the rejection she still fears. Yet, on the other, her acknowledgment that her tale is “ ‘not yet public; though it soon will be’ ” (HE 332) demonstrates that she has had enough of subterfuge and wishes finally to break out of the deceit and insincerity of the role she has been playing. She is also testing Mountclere to see if he is actually privy to her secret, gauging his response, and disarming his potential power over her. And indeed her performance does disarm him, although in an unexpected way, since as she proceeds “Lord Mountclere’s manner became so excited and anxious it acted reciprocally upon Ethelberta; her voice trembled, she moved her lips but uttered nothing . . . Though every one saw that she had broken down, none of them appeared to know the reason why . . . Fortunately Lord Mountclere came to her aid” (HE 334). Mountclere’s action in saving Ethelberta from this awkward moment by declaring the entertainment over, and his whispered direction “ ‘Don’t tell more: you think too much of them: they are no better than you!’ ” (HE 334), mark a moment of surprising emotional understanding, generated by a fleeting, though genuine, escape from conventional posturing, and it culminates in an expression of both cultural and personal candor: “But my father and friends?” said she. “Are nothing to be concerned about. Modern developments have shaken up the classes like peas in a hopper. An annuity, and a comfortable cottage—” “My brothers are workmen.” “Manufacture is the single vocation in which a man’s prospects may be said to be illimitable. Hee-hee!—they may buy me up before they die! And now what stands in the way? It would take fifty alliances with fifty families so little disreputable as yours, darling, to drag mine down.” (HE 335)
Through the text’s most aristocratic character Hardy provides an overt statement of the anxiety the novel is invoking—that “modern developments” have rendered class distinctions irrelevant, and that class identity can no longer be counted on to establish cultural worth. Mountclere’s
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confession of his own dangerous financial entanglements, couched as a compliment to Ethelberta’s laboring-class brothers, further suggests the seismic shifts that are occurring in Victorian society, and her recognition that “these words of self-depreciation . . . were let fall as much for her own future ease of conscience as for his present warning” makes her subsequent acceptance more than the successful completion of a scheme: “ ‘I shall think it a great honour to be your wife,’ she said simply” (HE 335). There is nothing ironic here: in this melodrama the apparent upper-class villain marries the servant-class heroine, not through trickery or blackmail, but through a shared moment of understanding that may not rise to the level of idealized romance, but is based on a mutual recognition of contemporary realities. The result, however, is a new secret, since Ethelberta is adamant that her engagement to Mountclere not be made public, because she is certain that her family will object. The novel’s next employment of farce, therefore, involves those who try to prevent the union once the betrothal is discovered. The journey undertaken by Ethelberta and Mountclere’s brothers to stop the marriage is soon matched by Ethelberta’s father, taking a different route, in order to achieve the same thing, and then by Julian throwing himself into the mix in a third effort to “rescue” her, the entire group being brought together when the carriage carrying the two brothers crashes into the dogcart carrying Mr. Petherwin and Julian, neither one of whom has recognized the other. This farrago provides Hardy with numerous opportunities for situational irony, culminating in a “ ‘Too late!’ ” (HE 410) declaration by Mr. Petherwin that, in a different Hardyan context, would signal tragedy.27 Here, however, it represents something very different, and it is Mrs. Doncastle, who is more than a little nonplussed to discover she has been entertaining as an equal the daughter of her butler, who delivers the appropriate summary: “ ‘What a funny thing!’ said the lady, with a wretchedly factitious smile. ‘The times have taken a strange turn when the angry parent of the comedy, who goes post-haste to prevent the undutiful daughter’s rash marriage, is a gentleman from below stairs, and the unworthy lover a peer of the realm!’ ” (HE 378). The times have indeed taken a “strange turn,” and characters who cannot adjust to the new discourses of modernity, whether they are Sol with his reverse snobbery or Mrs. Doncastle with her traditional kind, are rendered ineffectual. But this is an irregular comedy on more than one level, and its plot cannot be fully resolved by even so irregular a marriage. So Hardy turns once more to melodrama to conclude the exploits of his adventuress heroine. In the sensation pattern of the novel Ethelberta’s secret is discovered by Mountclere, then she and Mountclere share a secret, and at the end of the
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“Did you never hear anything of Lord Mountclere when we lived at Sandbourne?” “I knew the name—no more.” “No, no—of course you did not. Well, though I never saw his face . . . I know enough to say that, if earnest representations can prevent it, this marriage shall not be. Father knew him, or about him, very well; and he once told me—what I cannot tell you.” (HE 362)
Ethelberta, wandering through the grounds of the estate she now shares with her husband, discovers a cottage that “may be described as a sort of boudoir extracted from the bulk of a mansion and deposited in a wood” (HE 427), and when the servant there whispers in her ear “a story of about two minutes length” (HE 428), she feels an understandable shock at an impropriety that far exceeds any she has committed. However, her consequent flight from Enckworth Court is not an abject escape, but a retrenchment. Once again Deleuze and Parnet’s claim that “to flee is to produce the real, to create life, to find a weapon”28 is relevant: as Ethelberta declares to Sol when she tries to convince him to help her, “ ‘I must shun him till I’ve tackled him’ ” (HE 434). Her response to his challenge of “ ‘How can you shun him? You have married him!’ ” emphasizes her defiance: “ ‘Nevertheless, I won’t stay! Neither law nor gospel demands it of me after what I have learnt. And if law and gospel did demand it, I would not stay. And if you will not help me to escape, I go alone’ ” (HE 434). All of the apparent excess that follows this melodramatic declaration is a preparation for the final battle for agency, and it provides the novel’s final, characteristic ambiguity. The ensuing theatrical business and sensational tale of the runaway wife, with its clandestine notes, illicit assignations, darkened coach with a silent, mysterious figure seated in the corner, culminates in what seems Ethelberta’s complete defeat, with Mountclere and his senile giggle triumphant: “ ‘A very pleasant joke, my dear—hee-hee! And no more than was to be expected on this merry, happy day of our lives. Nobody enjoys a good jest more than I do: I always enjoyed a jest—hee-hee! . . . Take your husband’s arm’ ” (HE 443–444). Although Ethelberta does break down momentarily, the main result of the “wild unnatural” laugh denoting her
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text Mountclere’s secret is discovered by Ethelberta. That the viscount has a mistress is a gendered mystery, since it cannot be spoken to women but is well known to men. When, for example, Julian is agitated by the news of Ethelberta’s impending wedding, he is forced into the following very awkward conversation with Faith:
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sudden hysteria is that Mountclere becomes “greatly frightened” (HE 446), marking the first step in their negotiation toward her restored domination. Having received his promise that “ ‘the other Lady Mountclere’ ” (HE 447—emphasis in the original) will never return, her proposition that they “ ‘enter upon an armed neutrality’ ” is met by him with a renewed statement of devotion: “ ‘No. Let me be your adorer and slave again, as ever. Your beauty, dearest, covers everything! You are my mistress and queen!’ ”; and, just before the door closes on what will turn out to be the last direct sight of these characters the reader will be afforded, the viscount is heard directing his servants: “ ‘Women, attend to Lady Mountclere’ ” (HE 447). Ethelberta has generated one more sensational narrative, this time actually living out one of the melodramatic plots she might have contrived for performance, and although her story does not end the way she meant it to, her resilience is rewarded by a confirmation of the rank she has now secured. The novel’s concluding chapter, designated “Sequel,” is distanced from the rest of the plot in terms of both chronology and narrative, since it takes place “[t]wo years and a half after the marriage of Ethelberta” (HE 451), and the figure who has so dominated the text only fleetingly appears. That her current situation is exposed to detailed commentary by other characters has the effect of muting the sensational secrets that have characterized the novel’s plots, as Ethelberta’s new life is very much public knowledge. Upon asking about her union with Mountclere, Julian is told that “ ‘’tis said here and there that marrying her was the best day’s work that he ever did in his life, although she’s got to be my lord and my lady both’ ” (HE 452), that “ ‘[t]here was a little tussle at first; but how could a old man hold his own against such a spry young body as that . . . [p]oor old nobleman, she marches him off to church every Sunday . . . and keeps him down to three glasses of wine a day, strict’ ” (HE 452), and that by taking on the roles of “ ‘steward, agent, and everything’ ” (HE 453) she has saved the estate from bankruptcy. Ethelberta’s household arrangements, therefore, although obviously well in “hand,” are problematic emotionally, and the question “ ‘Is she happy with him?’ ” (HE 452) remains unanswered. Nonetheless, the text ends with a turn away from the melodramatic mode and toward a focus on domesticity that is driven home by its final scene: Julian’s proposal to, and acceptance by, Picotee. This confirms Dolin’s characterization of The Hand of Ethelberta as “a thoroughgoing pastiche”29 that achieves its social criticism through whatever forms serve it at a given moment. But if the goal of satire is to push readers toward an understanding of their own complicity in the structures being exposed, the explicit conjunction of courtship novel and sensation fiction has the ability
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Given the Victorian woman’s ambivalent agency . . . it is not surprising that marriage in many a mid-Victorian novel would present a problem as much as a resolution. First, they explore the “contingent” nature of agency that can be both exercised within and erased by social interactions within their plots . . . And second, for all of these novels, the consideration of readerly affect and subjection occurs at the interstices of genre, where novels play with their own conventions or invoke their own relationship to genre as a rhetorical gesture. Through generically self-conscious plots, the novels explore the reader’s vexed agency, asking what it means for a reader to choose to both accept and critique (critique while accepting) the discipline of the novel.30
Despite the individual authority she holds over her husband, Ethelberta has placed herself inside a disciplinary regime in which she is observed and commented upon without being able any longer to control that observation, this being the price for the cultural and financial capital she has maneuvered for, and which she wields so effectively. The marriage that results, with its gender equality (if not outright female dominance), symbolizes the general movement into modernity, the ambivalence of its cultural attractions for the individual reflected in the ambivalence of Ethelberta’s relationship with Mountclere. Hardy’s self-reflexive employment of shifting literary forms likewise leaves the reader uncertain about how to respond to the text, since the consistent genre indicators that would definitively indicate the “proper” reaction are never concretely established. We are left with the novel’s final, unresolved/irresolvable mystery: the enigma of the heroine’s feelings about the situation she has created for herself, and the enigma of our own “vexed agency” in partaking of the narrative and values that have led her to it. Ethelberta Petherwin, then, is the connecting character between Bathesheba Everdene and Paula Power, and not just because she falls chronologically between them in Hardy’s canon. In each of their stories he used sensationalism and melodrama to explore issues of cultural evolution toward a disciplinary discourse engaged with an emergent modernity, each woman moving toward a more fully realized contingent agency. In each novel he provided the text’s closure through an ambivalent marriage that appeared to fulfill the main female characters’ desires even as those marriages leave his audience thoroughly uncertain about the resolutions they provide. The insufficiency of this institution, in both literary and social terms, will be brought to its fullest expression through the experiences
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to generate potentially wider types of awareness, as Jones notes in her discussion of similar texts.
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of Jude Fawley and Sue Bridehead, these two characters providing the excessive fulfillment of all their predecessors’ (male and female) rebellious urges in the face of value systems in transition. The Hand of Ethelberta employs satire to generate its social criticism, and the melodramatic mode proves usefully adaptable for this purpose. In Jude the Obscure that mode will be pushed as far as it can in the services of social criticism as tragedy, and with it the aesthetics of Hardy’s antirealist project will reach their fullest expression.
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“ ‘Wherefore is light given to him that is in misery?’ ”: Sensationalist Tragedy, Melodramatic Modernity, and the Moral Occult (II) in Jude the Obscure
T
he violence of critical response provoked by the publication of Jude the Obscure is well documented, and does not need to be rehearsed in detail here. As Millgate notes, those who disliked the novel “felt free to express themselves with open vituperation,”1 and two representative illustrations from either side of the Atlantic will serve to communicate the perspective of such critics. The anonymous reviewer for the New York edition of the Bookman states that the novel “is simply one of the most objectionable books that we have ever read in any language whatsoever . . . for in our judgment frankly and deliberately expressed, in Jude the Obscure Mr. Hardy is merely speculating in smut,”2 while Margaret Oliphant, in her Blackwood’s article “The Anti-Marriage League,” decries Jude’s “grossness, indecency, and horror” before paying Hardy the scant compliment of declaring “[t]here may be books more disgusting, more impious as regards human nature, more foul in detail, in those dark corners where the amateurs of filth find garbage to their taste; but not . . . from any Master’s hand.”3 The extremity of these comments harkens back to the sensation fiction debates of the 1860s, to which indeed Oliphant had also contributed significantly, in much the same way and with much the same vehemence, demonstrating both her longevity and her consistency (not to say prudery).
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There can be no doubt, therefore, that Jude the Obscure was a literary sensation in its own right, and that its employment of sensation novel elements helped it achieve that notoriety. After all, a narrative that includes fornication, adultery, bigamy, divorce, child abandonment, two murders, two suicides, religious hysteria, and masochistic sexual self-immolation bids fair to outdo anything from the pages of Collins or Braddon, and might be expected to produce strong reactions. But it is important to recognize that the text had numerous defenders. While it is understandable that Hardy would take more to heart the often vicious repudiations of his work, and that his response to such attacks would be “bewilderment and distress,”4 the negative outcry was far from unanimous. Thus the anonymous reviewer for the Daily Telegraph, while acknowledging that the novel’s “prevailing gloom [is] unrelieved throughout,” also forcefully announces that “[i]n every other respect the book may be unhesitatingly pronounced a masterpiece,”5 while an anonymous writer for the Saturday Review comes directly to the author’s defense: It is doubtful, considering not only the greatness of the work, but also the greatness of the author’s reputation, whether for many years any book has received quite so foolish a reception as has been accorded the last and most splendid of all the books that Mr. Hardy has given the world . . . So active, so malignant have these sanitary inspectors of fiction become, that a period of terror, analogous to that of the New England Witch Mania, is upon us. No novelist, however respectable, can deem himself altogether safe today from a charge of morbidity and unhealthiness.6
Having demonstrated that both sides of this dispute were prone to hyperbole, again echoing the sensation fiction clashes earlier in the century, it is useful for my purposes to turn now to one of the more well-known contemporary essays on the novel, Havelock Ellis’ review article “Concerning Jude the Obscure,” written for the Savoy Magazine. After a brief overview of Hardy’s earlier work, and the English novel in general, he unequivocally declares that in “all the great qualities of literature Jude the Obscure seems to me to be the greatest novel written in England for many years,” reinforcing this evaluation toward the end of the piece by reiterating that the text is “a singularly fine piece of art.”7 Ellis then feels the need to bolster this evaluation with a statement that, by this point, is all too familiar: “In Jude the Obscure there is a fine self-restraint, a complete mastery of all the elements of an exceedingly human story. There is nothing here of the distressing melodrama into which Mr. Hardy was wont to fall in his early novels.”8 The need to declare any Hardy novel the critic wishes to endorse free of melodramatic aspects appears once again, but it seems especially strained
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in the context of this work. “Self-restraint,” for example, is an especially wishful designation, for both the author and his characters. It is Hardy’s willingness to explore extremities in this plot that has struck the vast majority of its readers most forcefully, and of course the melodramatic mode is fully suited to such a project. In fact, Ellis does grudgingly recognize the most glaring example of the text’s melodrama and sensationalism, although again, given his aesthetic position, it must be constructed as the novel’s one flaw. Only at one point, it seems to me, is there a serious lapse in the art of the book, and that is when the door of the bedroom closet is sprung open on us to reveal the row of childish corpses. Up to that one admires the strength and sobriety of the narrative . . . We feel that here are real human beings of the sort we all know . . . But with the opening of that cupboard we are thrust out of the large field of common life into that small field of the police court or the lunatic asylum . . . Nor can it be said that so wholesale a murder was required for the constructive development of the history; a much less serious catastrophe would surely have sufficed to influence the impressionable Sue.9
The desire that Hardy concentrate on “real human beings” while remaining within the “large field of common life”—that is, that he remain within the bounds of realism—is seriously subverted by the introduction of Little Father Time and the sensationalism of his murder/suicide, Ellis’ invocation of “the police court” and “the lunatic asylum” specifically demarcating the realms of sensation fiction narratives. Although the critic wishes to construct this scene as an anomaly within the text, his own comments provide a suggestion about why it is not. First of all, his claim that the act was not “required” by the story is precisely correct, but misses the point. The novel’s employment of excess, whether physical, emotional, or psychological, is consistent from start to finish, so that this terrible moment is the culmination of a pattern crucial to Hardy’s rhetorical purpose, and not an incongruity. Second, Ellis’ use of the word “catastrophe” evokes (perhaps unintentionally) classical tragedy, from which the term originates, and which in this case helps us understand what the text is attempting. As Brooks notes, “[m]elodrama is similar to tragedy in asking us to endure the extremes of pain and anguish. It differs in constantly reaching toward the ‘too much’ . . . The familial structure that melodrama (like Greek tragedy) so often exploits contributes to the experience of excruciation: the most basic loyalties and relationships become a source of torture.”10 In Jude the Obscure Hardy combines tragedy with the “too much” of melodrama to create sensationalist tragedy, a narrative that by employing the extremities of sensation fiction amplifies the
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“experience of excruciation” through a relentless assault on the reader’s affective responses. The goal of this hybrid form, however, is not an abstract catharsis, but rather a very specific pity and fear laced with anger and a sense of waste, producing a desire to change the materialist structures that the novel presents as destructively oppressive. It is these that, in exaggerating and compounding the characters’ own weaknesses, cause familial structures to become sources of torture, climaxing in Little Father Time’s act of horrific annihilation, an excessive response to a system in which, as the novel’s epigraph declares, “The letter killeth.”11 Jude the Obscure’s manipulation of genre, therefore, is as integral to its social criticism as is The Hand of Ethelberta’s, though the novels’ unequal status within Hardy’s canon means that they are seldom brought into relation with each other. Fisher, however, makes the important observation that “[t]he process of Jude and Sue’s self-education, the rationalization of almost every event in intellectual-ideological terms, as they interpret their world through their imaginary relation to real relations, becomes often pathetically ludicrous . . . This creates a structure of experience as artificial, and to a bourgeois reader as grotesque and improbable, as Ethelberta’s,” which leads to an even more direct link with the assertion that “the most consistent harmonizing discourse of Jude the Obscure’s narrative is (often extreme and grotesque) satire.”12 Ethelberta’s ironically successful ability to work within a class status discourse and rise to the top of its hierarchy generates a comedic satire on the trivial society the novel mocks, while Jude and Sue’s inability to successfully negotiate their aspirations leads to a tragic satire of unfulfilled potential and an excoriating attack on the social values that contribute to their destruction. In both texts the main characters engage with a nascent modernity that generates ambivalent possibilities for change, but in Jude they are ultimately vanquished by older cultural constructions that, in turn, are exposed as illegitimate protectors of established power. Aaron Matz, however, in his provocative article “Terminal Satire and Jude the Obscure,” suggests the complexity of this particular merging of genres when he argues that “[i]n Hardy’s staging of circumstance, satire is what happens when a person becomes aware of his own tragedy. Satire is a name for self-consciousness and recognition, even when this may be a false recognition.”13 Crucially, in Jude tragedy centers on questions of perception, so that satire, as a sophisticated form of irony that depends on the ability to distinguish between appearance and reality, reinforces the need to try and look beyond conventional assumptions. In other words, Jude, Sue, and even at certain points Phillotson are shown struggling to see past the limitations imposed upon them, and in the engagement with their struggles the reader is also meant to see past those artificial impositions, and
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to question their legitimacy. The difficulty of this process in the narrative creates the intensity of engagement that Hardy relies upon to move his audience with the characters’ painful predicaments, and while the melodramatic mode increases that intensity, it contributes another element to the overall tragic effect. As Matz goes on to argue, “[s]atire in Hardy must be vague . . . if it were too specific, we would be able to discern in too vivid detail the identity of the forces acting upon Jude Fawley. Jude the Obscure relies heavily on its hazy suspicion of ‘things’: Jude and Sue’s contemplation, late in the book, of ‘the direct antagonism of things’ is exemplary of the novel’s stance towards the vagueness of animosity.”14 Jude’s designation as “obscure” in the novel’s title hints at a broader obscurity that haunts the text, and leads us back to Brooks’ concept of the moral occult, the need “to find, to articulate, to demonstrate, to ‘prove’ the existence of a moral universe which, though put into question, masked by villainy and perversions of judgment, does exist.”15 In my earlier discussion of The Mayor of Casterbridge I suggested that Henchard is living a modified version of the moral occult—that his attempt to break through the occlusions of his shifting culture and his own conflicted character provide the melodramatic foundation of a tragedy that is reinforced by his inability to articulate the insights gained through his suffering. Something very similar is happening in Jude, but in this case the characters are given the ability to articulate their sense of what is wrong with the social structures oppressing them, and it is these statements that have generated the novel’s reputation for being aggressively didactic. However, as with Mayor, the Manichean certainties of traditional melodrama are subverted by the ironizing strategies of a text that always reminds the reader of the contingent and subjective nature of even its sympathetic characters’ perceptions. The most often-noted example of this is Jude’s attitude toward Christminster, an attitude formed in childhood and never really relinquished no matter how that city fails to live up to his projections. In “Modernising Tragedy in Hardy’s Later Fiction,” K. M. Newton observes that “irony predominates in Hardy’s treatment of idealism . . . [he] relentlessly exposes the failure of any of Jude’s ideals to have any correspondence with reality . . . Jude’s idealism about Christminster is continually contradicted by his experience of the place, but to give up the ideal is impossible for him.”16 Hardy’s modernizing of tragedy is thus linked to the modernity of the melodramatic mode, in that once again the moral occult becomes the cultural condition encompassing Jude and Sue, their ability to elucidate their sense of wrong in the end providing them with no more power to evade their tragic fates than does Henchard’s unstated anagnorisis; but this has a very different effect on their audience. Kramer notes that in Jude a “pervasive relativism results from the complexity of
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perspectives,” and that the “alternations of views among the narrator and the characters keeps allegiances in suspension, a factor important to the creation of tragedy by presenting no easy choices.”17 The reader is forced to share Jude and Sue’s efforts to discover an ethical stance in a world of ambivalent possibilities through engaging with their own shifting declarations, each evaluation of their situation located within an ambivalently transitional social context. The result is a more explicit engagement with cultural forces than that provided by The Mayor of Casterbridge, since as self-aware inhabitants of the world that so perplexes Henchard they can at least partially express their sense of “the flaw in the terrestrial scheme” (Jude 11) that encompasses them. One way to think of this novel, then, is to see each of its main characters as attempting to construct an identity through which they can generate an adequately expressive sense of self in a culture of occluded ethical imperatives. The conflict generated by these attempts drives the story’s melodrama (and its tragedy), not only because the desires in play are irreconcilable between individuals, but also because a number of them are unacceptable to residual social mores as well. For Jude and Sue especially there is simply no place for them to enact the individuality they wish to construct, in Jude’s case because it can only be achieved through a class mobility that is still fiercely resisted, and in Sue’s because it can only be achieved through a sexual autonomy that is equally reprobated. Both are guilty of what the text describes as “the modern vice of unrest” (Jude 85), although they hardly deserve the punishment eventually meted out to them. Even Phillotson’s “ ‘scheme, or dream’ ” (Jude 4) of university graduation and ordination demonstrates a wish to re-create himself, and although his aspiration is less seditious than Jude’s because he starts from a more advanced position, he also fails to achieve his goal. In other words, these characters are attempting to perform modernity, to take advantage of the flexibility it at least ostensibly provides, but they are restricted by a vestigial Victorianism that the text presents as destructive in its outmoded rigidity. When Jude finally arrives in Christminster and wanders its streets, recalling the great men whose books he has studied, we are told that he “found himself speaking out loud, holding conversations with them as it were, like an actor in a melodrama who apostrophizes the audience on the other side of the footlights” (Jude 81), and indeed he is an actor in a melodrama, although finally it will be the author who created him who will truly apostrophize his audience. Hardy’s choice of mode is especially appropriate for this novel in that “the melodramatic representation of power . . . was entirely compatible with the democratic, antiaristocratic, and antistatist tradition of popular radicalism,”18 and it is obvious that critics like Oliphant, who responded with such vehement
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dislike to the text, were at least as upset by its harsh questioning of the status quo as they were by its supposed failures in artistry and good taste. It is not necessary, however, to wait for Jude’s arrival at Christminster to find him associated with this form since, very early on, as he is drawing water from the communal well and unhappily contemplating Phillotson’s departure from Marygreen, we are told that “[h]e said to himself in the melodramatic tones of a whimsical boy, that the schoolmaster had drawn at that well scores of times on a morning like this, and would never draw there any more” (Jude 5). This may at first seem dismissive, since the young Jude’s melodramatic response is said to be based on juvenile whimsy, but such a reading is modified by a similar formulation that appears after he has been beaten and dismissed by Farmer Troutham for allowing the rooks to eat his corn: “ ‘Mr. Troutham have turned me away . . . And there’s my wages—the last that I shall ever hae!’ He threw the sixpence tragically on the table” (Jude 12). Of course these are not the last wages Jude will ever have, so his tragedy seems as overstated as his melodrama, but the sensitivity on display will be the source of both his adult perceptiveness and his torment, which crucially makes him available as the text’s center of sensation. As the narrator observes, “[t]his weakness of character, as it may be called, suggested that he was the sort of man who was born to ache a good deal before the fall of the curtain upon his unnecessary life” (Jude 11), the sentence’s carefully inserted qualifier implying that this “weakness” is only construable as such in a world where being crassly obtuse is a “strength.” Jude’s excessive responses, from boyhood on, act to break through the readers’ acceptance of things-as-they-are by forcing us to connect with his pain, a necessary step if the materialist causes of that pain are to be acknowledged. Cvetkovich asserts that “if the sensational figures that Victorian texts render so compelling affectively are to be effective politically, those figures must be read as local symptoms of more general problems,”19 and this is very much how Hardy employs his eponymous protagonist. Jude’s tragedy is sensational in that his “sensibility” leaves him vulnerable to the cultural forces that surround and overwhelm him, which in turn produce the sensationally melodramatic events that mark his victimization. In his exploration of expressionism in Spinoza’s philosophy, Deleuze asks the reader to “[c]onsider a mode with a given essence and a given capacity to be affected . . . insofar as its capacity to be affected is exercised by passive affections, this capacity itself appears as a force or power of suffering,”20 a formulation that goes to the heart of Jude’s predicament. Conditioned to passive affect through both his general class status as an orphan without social prospects and the specifics of an upbringing that
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insists, as his great-aunt Drusilla declares, “ ‘It would ha’ been a blessing if Goddy-mighty had took thee too wi’ thy mother and father, poor useless boy!’ ” (Jude 7), he is inescapably defined by the force of his suffering. Even his aspirations to learning and status mobility, embodied in his apparently active desire to attend university at Christminster, are the results of an affective response to Phillotson’s removal from his life, and are therefore largely reactive. The aspects of Jude’s character that are his tragic characteristics, his idealism, sensitivity, passivity, and the heightened awareness they produce, find expression in self-destructive behaviors such as his proclivity to drink and susceptibility to sexual manipulation because he is unable to negotiate successfully the transitional cultural moment in which he finds himself. The result is that “Hardy’s form of tragedy is less consoling [than earlier types] since it replaces the realm of the gods with an indifferent world . . . creating a form of the tragic appropriate to the modern, or post-Darwinian, era.”21 And perhaps the best way to illustrate Jude’s tragic inability to adapt to his evolving situation is by contrasting it to the woman who first forces him to confront the gap between the ideal and the real, and whose own ability to survive in many environments acts as an ironic comment on the opportunities provided by the new discourses of modernity. Arabella Donn’s famously provocative method of catching Jude’s attention, by throwing at him “a piece of flesh, the characteristic part of a barrow-pig” and thus smacking him “sharply in the ear” (Jude 35) with a pig’s penis, identifies immediately upon which side she belongs in “the deadly war waged between flesh and spirit” (Jude xxxv) evoked in Hardy’s Preface to the First Edition. Yet her assertively embodied sensuality/ sexuality, and her awareness of the sometimes harsh requirements of existence, generates an immanence that cannot simply be dismissed. On one hand, as Garson points out, she is a “wicked temptress, and Jude should have known better than to fall for her,”22 yet, on the other, her own sharp perceptiveness penetrates some of the delusions that befuddle and paralyze Jude and Sue. Arabella’s ability to “read” people and situations is, it turns out, an acquired one, and, appropriately in a book whose hero she renders melodramatically susceptible to liquor, it is her role as barmaid that best symbolizes her modernistic adaptability. The quality usually advanced as indicative of Arabella’s femme fatale status is her entrapping artificiality, most especially her ability to produce dimples on demand, the false claim of pregnancy through which she convinces Jude to marry her, and the “long tail of [false] hair” (Jude 57) that she reveals to him on their wedding night. The “sudden distaste for her” that this final object produces leads to his assertion “ ‘you’ve enough of your own, surely,’ ” which in turn produces the following exchange:
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“Yes, enough as country notions go. But in towns the men expect more, and when I was barmaid at Aldbrickham—” “Barmaid at Aldbrickham?”
Of course Arabella’s attempt to distance herself from her premarital job is not very convincing, since it is difficult to see how you can be “ ‘not exactly a barmaid’ ” when you were occupied “ ‘drawing drink at a public house,’ ” so it is unsurprising to the reader that, years after she she and Jude separate, he next encounters her maintaining herself in the same work: [t]he barmaid attending to this compartment was invisible to Jude’s direct glance, though a reflection of her back in the glass behind her was occasionally caught by his eyes . . . she turned her face for a moment to the glass to set her hair tidy. Then he was amazed to discover that the face was Arabella’s. (Jude 186)
And finally, when she is forced by the death of her second husband and the quarrel with her father to fall back on Jude’s support, she identifies herself to his landlord as a “ ‘barmaid at the Lamb and Flag formerly’ ” before attempting to obtain “another place in the occupation she understood best” (Jude 392). The repeated emphasis on what can only be called Arabella’s profession suggests that more attention needs to be paid to its significance, especially given Peter Bailey’s insistence that “the barmaid, a seemingly unproblematical social type . . . was not always taken for granted, but has a specific and indeed sensational history of her own in the Victorian era, one of whose important themes is her glamorous embodiment of a distinct form of modernity.”23 Hardy’s assignment of this sensationally contemporary form of female employment to one of the novel’s main characters provides another illustration of the novel’s emphasis on modern construction of the self. The pubs in which Arabella works are manifestly different from earlier examples of liquor-serving establishments such as Warren’s Malthouse in Far from the Madding Crowd or Rolliver’s Alehouse in Tess of the d’Urbervilles,24 and they therefore require a different form of service. Part of the modern cityscape, [i]n catering to the more numerous, transitory and anonymous urban crowd, the new pubs were much bigger, and sales were made across a bar counter which separated customers from the drink supply and made for a
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“Well, not exactly barmaid—I used to draw the drink at a public-house there—just for a little time; that was all. Some people put me up to getting this, and I bought it just for a fancy.” (Jude 57)
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This is obviously the type of establishment in which Arabella finds employment, since when Jude encounters her it is in “a bar that had been entirely renovated and refitted in modern style . . . mahogany fixtures having taken the place of the old painted ones, while . . . The room was divided into compartments in the approved manner, between which were screens of ground glass in mahogany framing,” and she is one of the two barmaids who “[o]n the inside of the counter . . . leant over the white-handled beer-engines, and the row of little silvered taps inside” (Jude 185–186). The new form of pub represents the new form of urban culture, and Arabella’s ability to fit herself into it signifies her commitment to the modern-day world in opposition to the past, as symbolized by the learning offered at the Christminster colleges she aggressively spurns when married to Jude. But there is a further significance in this setting, for the “bar counter with its newly sumptuous fittings . . . provided a framing effect that gave it the dramatic properties of a stage, thus heightening the presence of its attendants as social actors and objects of display.”26 Arabella’s position as barmaid becomes a precise semiotic for the performance element of her character, which from a negative perspective might be identified as “artificiality,” but from a more positive one could as readily be described as acted empowerment. Arabella has, in her own way, chosen as performative a career as did Ethelberta, both of them playing a part in the urban social drama that allows them to escape the limitations of their assigned class identities. Of course Ethelberta is finally much more successful in her achievement of status, and while Arabella is sexually transgressive in ways that Ethelberta is not, she is insulated from the destructive impact on reputation of such impropriety by the modern mobility that allows her to leave her “mistakes” (such as Jude) behind. Bailey argues that “much of the impact of the barmaid lay in her enhanced public visibility, her staged openness to the ‘scrutinizing glance,’ ” and that “[w]hat is significant here is not just, as we now conventionally say, the woman as sex object, but the woman as bearer of glamour, arguably a distinctively modern visual property . . . in its practice of managed arousal.”27 In other words, Arabella has learned how to translate her sexual attractiveness into spectacle, while the phrase “managed arousal” nicely describes her erotic maneuvers, from slipping a bird’s egg into her bosom early in the text to slipping a love philter into the wine of a prospective suitor at its end. And this sexual agency, learned on the “stage” of the public house, prevents her
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more efficient and secure operation . . . The new pubs needed the barmaid both as staff behind the counters of its enlarged premises and as a further item of allurement among its mirrors and mahogany, its brassware and coloured tile.25
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victimization by the male gaze even as (again like Ethelberta) she courts it. Finally, therefore, “the barmaid protected herself from the beeriness and leeriness of the pub’s sexual culture by her own manipulation of its parameters of distance and intimacy . . . The crucial function of the bar comes across plainly here, as does [the] modern consciousness of barwork as role-playing,” so that “the evidence suggests that in general the Victorian barmaid was an assertive and competent modernist.”28 By utilizing the popular entertainment spaces of the new public house, and by making the figure of a barmaid so central to his story, Hardy embeds a telling expression of modernity in his narrative while at the same time integrating an element that would have invoked for his Victorian readers a figure of sexual display and spectacle. Yet the ambivalence that pervades the characterization of Arabella once again emphasizes the ambiguities of nineteenth-century cultural transformation. Her relentless pursuit of the main chance through manipulative self-performance suits her environment, and illustrates “the disjunctions of modernité—the unsettling mobility, the shifting and elusive nature of identity, the emphasis on externals,”29 but this method of coping, effective though it may on some level be, hardly receives the novel’s full endorsement. It is Sue and Jude’s tragically failed efforts to come to terms with the modern that receives the book’s sympathy, and directs its cultural critique. Certainly Arabella is in some ways sensational enough—her bigamous marriage to Carlett in Australia replicates a plot twist found in numerous works of sensation fiction—but she remains largely on the margins of the text’s melodramatic core. As an essentially amoral character Arabella cannot readily participate in the moral occult that melodrama stages, but Jude and Sue are certainly available to do so. Nonetheless, Arabella plays a significant role in the novel’s first full-fledged sensation scene, and in doing so she helps initiate the excess that will typify the rest of the text. Newton rightly notes that the “fundamental difference” between Jude and Arabella is “highlighted in the pig-killing scene . . . [the] incident when they are forced into killing the animal themselves when the pig-killer fails to turn up,” but his subsequent observation that “Hardy’s anthropomorphic treatment of the pig . . . may appear to create a melodramatic and artificial conflict”30 is more interesting. Part of what makes the scene so sensational is its graphic naturalism in presenting an animal being butchered, but its real affective force derives from its insistence on representing the sensations of that animal leading up to and encompassing its death. The melodramatic force generated can only be defined as “anthropomorphic” and “artificial” if one is willing to believe that animals have no legitimate affective experiences of their own, a position that is aligned with Arabella and that the novel and Jude refuse to accept. It is to Newton’s
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credit that he recognizes how Hardy’s use of melodramatic excess here, far from being a flaw, drives home a key aspect of his Darwinian theme, in that since “both human beings and animals are the product of evolutionary process . . . there [can] be no metaphysical justification for regarding animals merely as designed by the creator for human exploitation.”31 Jude’s sympathetic perception of animal subjectivity (foreshadowed by his boyhood reaction to the rooks in Farmer Troutham’s field) provides an indication of the general ethic both he and the text are moving toward, one that insists on connection rather than exclusion, and one that repudiates any system that, by objectifying the “other,” denies autonomy through the unthinking imposition of a hierarchy of worth—the kind of system that would say “it is only a pig.” Gunning suggests “the moral occult and the effects of the sensation scene do not exclude each other, since the strong impression of a sensation scene could conceivably express a moral order,”32 and certainly what Hardy is attempting in this instance is to use sensationalism to reinforce a broad principle. Nonetheless, in the end Jude does kill the pig, and this demonstrates that the ethic being advanced is not narrowly focused on the question of whether it is right or wrong to eat animals. A closer look at the details of the scene reveals Hardy’s primary concern. The conversation Jude and Arabella hold once she has decided that the butcher is not going to arrive establishes the scene’s rhetorical purpose, especially after Jude tries to postpone the event. “He’s not coming. Drunk last night, I expect. The snow is not enough to hinder him, surely!” “Then we must put it off. It is only the water boiled for nothing. The snow may be deep in the valley.” “Can’t be put off. There’s no more victuals for the pig. He ate the last mixing o’ barleymeal yesterday morning.” “Yesterday morning? What has he lived on since?” “Nothing.” “What—he has been starving?” “Yes. We always do it the last day or two, to save bother with the innerds. What ignorance, not to know that!” “That accounts for his crying so. Poor creature!” (Jude 62–63)
This callous treatment of the pig obviously has very little with to do with generating human sustenance, and everything to do with human convenience. The imposed starvation saves “bother with the innerds,” justifying
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cruelty through the assumption that an animal’s experience is irrelevant to the expediency of transforming a living being into meat. Jude’s response, which involves interpreting the pig’s earlier cries, is a sympathetic identification that refuses to accept this de-subjectification, revealing an “ignorance” of the supposedly proper attitude toward culturally determined lesser creatures that demonstrates more than unfamiliarity with the mechanics of pork production. Given repeated Victorian discourses identifying the lower classes as animalistic this scene takes on a wider significance since, as Sherryl Vint notes, “[t]he homology between symbolic and real ingestions of the other explains why metaphors of consumption are so often used to explain exploitation relationships.”33 Just as it is convenient to those with power over it to keep this animal starved of food, so it is convenient for those in power to keep laborers such as Jude starved of the advanced education he desires, since otherwise it would be much harder to designate them an unequal other available to be exploited. But Hardy’s development of this homology only reaches its maximum impact when the scene moves into complete sensationalism. To increase the reader’s growing unease the text details the pig’s response to the process of his killing. We are told that “Jude, rope in hand, got into the sty, and noosed the affrighted animal, who, beginning with a squeak of surprise, rose to repeated cries of rage” (Jude 63). The movement from fright, to surprise, to rage presents responses that are generally acknowledged as available to animals, and thus while they may create an uncomfortable affect they maintain an assumed human/animal boundary. But subsequent descriptions are different. Once Arabella and Jude have “hoisted the victim on to the stool, legs upward . . . looping the cord over his legs to keep him from struggling . . . The animal’s note changed its quality. It was not now rage, but the cry of despair; long-drawn, slow and hopeless” (Jude 63). Describing the pig as a “victim” suggests a sensational crime is being committed; his “despair” moves this violence into a realm that breaks down the easy acceptance of the coming death, while to dismiss Hardy’s presentation as anthropomorphism serves simply to provide “an alibi for human behaviour. We construct animals as radically unlike ourselves in order to justify our behaviour toward them: they do not feel pain but merely respond to stimuli.”34 And the foundational reason for such a construction is made clear in Arabella and Jude’s next exchange, as she advises him on how to fulfill a task he finds increasingly distasteful. “Now whatever you do, don’t stick un too deep.” “I’ll stick him effectually, so as to make short work of it. That’s the chief thing.”
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This bald justification of prolonged suffering based on the profit motive once again has direct applicability to Jude and his class, since they too must be “well bled” to achieve maximum productivity in the service of their social superiors, and they too were often culturally defined as less susceptible to pain than their middle-class masters. Jude’s refusal to inflict such extended misery, his insistence on killing quickly by stabbing the pig deeply in the throat, leads to the grim climax of the scene: However unworkmanlike the deed, it had been mercifully done. The blood flowed out in a torrent instead of in the trickling stream she had desired. The dying animal’s cry assumed its third and final tone, the shriek of agony; his glazing eyes riveting themselves on Arabella with the eloquently keen reproach of a creature recognizing at last the treachery of those who had seemed his only friends. (Jude 64)
This is sensational on two levels. First of all, it fully collapses the human/animal divide. The pig’s “shriek of agony” demands of the reader a fully shared affective response to this fellow creature, while his gaze’s “eloquently keen reproach” of the “treachery” perpetrated against him by his betrayer suggests the sensationally disturbing idea that such a killing may be translated directly into human terms. Second, the graphic detail provided by Hardy generates a sensory shock to a readership increasingly removed from the realities of the modes of production that sustain it, and not just concerning its food supply. What might be thought of by some as an excessive specificity shows once again how realism and sensationalism may combine to create a culturally engaged melodrama that, in this case, challenges the too-easy establishment of subject/object boundaries foundational to social stratification. Without generating a simplistic correlation between Jude and the animal he butchers, Hardy implies that his human protagonist will be the victim of a similar process of othering, his ability to understand more readily the forces causing his destruction deepening the tragedy of his alienated and obscure experience. Ironically, Arabella is disturbed by the sounds made by the dying pig not because she feels any connection to its plight, but because of her concern for their newly married status: “ ‘Make un stop that!’ said Arabella. ‘Such a noise will bring somebody or other up here, and I don’t want people to know we are doing it ourselves’ ” (Jude 64). Her acceptance of
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“You must not!” she cried. “The meat must be well bled, and to do that he must die slow. We shall lose a shilling a score if the meat is red and bloody . . . Every good butcher keeps un bleeding long. He ought to be eight or ten minutes dying, at least.” (Jude 63)
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and investment in the class and economic hierarchies that oppress them both is another indication of a survival instinct that adapts itself to the realities at hand, but the problematic purposes revealed by the way in which the animal was killed significantly compromise her bluntly pragmatic assertions that “ ‘Pigs must be killed’ ” (Jude 64) and “ ‘Poor folks must live’ ” (Jude 65). While there is certainly some truth in these statements, the parallel structure underlying their apparent opposition about who must die and who must live suggests a shared experience of marginalization and disposability by the system that the text presents as consuming both pigs and the poor. The final striking image, created when Jude accidentally kicks over the pail holding the pig’s blood, thus haunts both him and the reader, as “only about a third of the whole steaming liquid was left in it, the main part being splashed over the snow, and forming a dismal, sordid, ugly spectacle—to those who saw it as other than an ordinary obtaining of meat” (Jude 64–65). This is the culminating “spectacle” of this melodramatic scene, and clearly Hardy intends his audience to join those who see beyond what it literally describes. Jude’s struggle to understand what so disturbs him about the experience is centered on this image, but at this early point in the novel he cannot fully grasp its implications. Jude felt dissatisfied with himself as a man at what he had done, though aware of his lack of common sense . . . The white snow, stained with the blood of his fellow-mortal, wore an illogical look to him as a lover of justice, not to say a Christian; but he could not see how the matter was to be mended. No doubt he was, as his wife had called him, a tender-hearted fool. (Jude 65)
The text’s sensationalism creates the excess that undercuts Arabella’s evaluation of Jude, since one scarcely needs to be “tender-hearted” to share Jude’s affective response to what has occurred, and in this way Hardy encourages us to identify with Jude’s sensitivity even if he does not always completely endorse the idealism at its root. The statement that he cannot “see how the matter was to be mended” is crucial to his tragedy, since it will hold when matters become even more complicated by subsequent events. Given the drastic incompatibility revealed in the pig-killing scene it is hardly surprising that Jude and Arabella’s marriage collapses immediately afterward, the failure given added impetus by Jude overhearing two of her friends gossiping about the ruse that led to their union, and by the subsequent argument that leads to her throwing his books on the floor and smearing them with grease from her “operation of making lard” (Jude 68). This symbolic “ ‘soiling’ ” (Jude 68) of his ideals, as Jude perceives it, is too much for him, and he grabs Arabella to make her stop. The melodramatic
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she crossed the room to the door, out of which she went with a set face, and into the highway. Here she began to saunter up and down, perversely pulling her hair into a worse disorder than he had caused, and unfastening several buttons of her gown. It was a fine Sunday morning, dry, clear and frosty, and the bells of Alfredston Church could be heard on the breeze from the north. People were going along the road, dressed in their holiday clothes . . . These pedestrians turned to stare at the extraordinary spectacle she now presented, bonnetless, her disheveled hair blowing in the wind, her bodice apart, her sleeves rolled above her elbows for her work, and her hands reeking with melted fat. One of the passers said in mock terror: “Good Lord deliver us!” “See how he’s served me!” she cried. “Making me work Sunday mornings when I ought to be going to my church, and tearing my hair off my head, and the gown off my back!” (Jude 69)
Arabella’s willingness to literally make a “spectacle” of herself in order to shape public perception is an empty enactment, since of course Jude had nothing to do with her working on Sunday rather than going to church and tore neither her hair nor her gown, so that she uses the spectacular to distract and mislead. As Debord’s Thesis 18 notes, since in modern culture “the spectacle’s job is to cause a world that is no longer directly perceptible to be seen via different specialized mediations, it is inevitable that it should elevate the human sense of sight to the special place once occupied by touch; the most abstract of the senses, and the most easily deceived, sight is naturally the most readily adaptable to present day society’s generalized abstraction.”35 This is very different from the viscerally “sordid, ugly spectacle” of the blood in the snow already discussed, because that kind of inadvertent, unmanufactured spectacle provides the opportunity to break through social occlusions. In both Jude and Ethelberta Hardy is suggesting that the move toward individualized spectacle—what might be called spectacle as self-promotion or spectacle as ego-assertion—is a move away from the communal resistance to modernity it was at least partially still able to provide in Far from the Madding Crowd. Arabella creates a spectacular performance as an abused wife and, having done so, simply walks out of her relationship, the spectacle becoming the sufficient, self-justifying rationale for leaving her husband with the laconic note “Have gone to my friends. Shall not return” (Jude 71—italics in the original). Jude’s initial response to all of this, after visiting his aunt and discovering from her the failure of his own parents’ marriage, and being told
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display that results when Jude releases her provides a final example of Arabella’s performative skills before Hardy removes her (for a time) from the text:
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that his mother “ ‘soon afterwards died . . . drowned herself, in short’ ” (Jude 70), is to attempt suicide himself by walking out to the middle of a frozen pond and jumping on the ice. When the ice cracks but does not break he supposes “he was not a sufficiently dignified person for suicide” and, asking himself what he “could do of a lower kind than selfextermination; what was there less noble, more in keeping with his present degraded position?” (Jude 70), decides that he will get drunk. As he says to himself, drinking is “the regular, stereotyped resource of the despairing worthless” (Jude 70–71), a statement that signals Hardy’s invocation of the same type of ironic temperance melodrama that he employed in The Mayor of Casterbridge. As with the earlier text, because this form of melodrama was not restricted to the virtue-rewarded closure of the genre it is available for tragedy in a way that specifically suits Hardy’s purpose. The idea that inebriation is the “stereotyped” explanation for the failures of the “despairing worthless” exposes the comforting bourgeois assumption that the lower classes, lacking the discipline required to achieve success in the competitive world of capitalist advancement, bring their debased status upon themselves. If Jude’s laborious self-training in Greek and Latin shows anything it is that he does not lack discipline, so that his subsequent vulnerability to alcohol is not the source of his downfall, as was the standard plotline in temperance melodramas such as The Drunkard’s Doom (1832), The Bottle (1847), or Destroyed by Drink (1879), but is instead the calculated response to being thwarted by a culture structured to prevent his advancement no matter how dedicated he is to self-improvement. Hardy takes this theatrical trope (usually aimed at laboring-class workmen such as his protagonist) and, by reversing the expected cause-and-effect pattern, turns the criticism back toward his middle-class audience’s selfsatisfied assumption of superiority. As Devereux puts it, “the tragedy is not caused simply by the demon drink, but by a complex gathering of problems having mainly to do with social, sexual, and gender”36 issues, and those problems cannot be assigned solely, or even mainly, to flaws in individual character. Later, after his drunken recitation of the Nicene Creed in a Christminster pub, the act that signals the end of his dream of a university education as well as the end of his initial stay in that city, Jude visits Mr. Highbridge, the local curate, and delivers a kind of confession. The chapter, and “Part Second: At Christminster,” concludes with the following exchange: The curate, who was a new man to this neighbourhood, had grown deeply interested, and at last he said: “ ‘If you feel a real call to the ministry, and I won’t say from your conversation that you do not, for it is that of a
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thoughtful and educated man, you might enter the Church as a licentiate. Only you must make up your mind to avoid strong drink.” ’
Certainly Jude’s fragile sensibility leads him at times of extreme stress to seek escape in a bottle, but the cultural causes of that stress are the book’s targets, not his weakness or liquor itself, and like Henchard he is victimized by being caught in a changing world that has no secure place for his aspirations, and thus offers him no “hope.” But in Jude Hardy doubles the tragic impact with the introduction of Sue, who is equally unable to adapt, so that the novel’s two main characters end up amplifying each other’s pain, as well as the reader’s. The temporal setting of the novel has caused some debate about Sue, since if its events take place in the 1860s then her characterization falls within the Girl of the Period controversy, while if it is set in the 1890s then Sue becomes part of that decade’s equally robust dispute over the New Woman.37 Hardy, in a typically indirect and retrospective evaluation for his 1912 Postscript, seems to endorse the second possibility in his declaration that [a]fter the issue of Jude the Obscure as a serial story in Germany, an experienced reader of that country informed the writer that Sue Bridehead, the heroine, was the first delineation in fiction of the woman who was coming into notice in her thousands every year—the woman of the feminist movement—the slight, pale “bachelor” girl—the intellectualized, emancipated bundle of nerves that modern conditions were producing, mainly in cities as yet; who does not recognize the necessity for most of her sex to follow marriage as a profession, and boast themselves as superior people because they are licensed to be loved on the premises. (Jude xxxviii)
Whether she is a Girl of the Period or a New Woman, this description demonstrates why Sue’s representation is sensationalist, since her modern repudiation of established Victorian values provides a startling challenge to standard beliefs about women’s proper place and behavior. If Arabella is sensational because she is willing to use the opportunities provided by modernity to construct spectacular enactments that, while generating possibilities for personal autonomy, do not challenge systemic power structures, Sue is sensational because her radical desire for sexual and gender self-determination significantly undercuts those same structures. Thus although the two women who most influence Jude are often constructed as categorical opposites, they are united through the mode of excess that
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“I could avoid that easily enough, if I had any kind of hope to support me!” (Jude 128–129)
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characterizes their interaction with him, and that therefore drives the text’s tragedy. Further, melodrama’s employment of shifting amorous relationships and rivalries to generate conflict and symbolize wider social tensions is taken to an absurd extreme with the introduction of Sue, since as Patricia Ingham notes the rotating marriages that result “represent a kind of merry-go-round which trivializes them . . . This repetition of marriages contracted or dissolved for the wrong reasons figures the institution as a farcical game.”38 Aside from aiding Hardy’s criticism of a contract that licenses women “to be loved on the premises,” this painful set of unions and disunions has the non-farcical effect of forcing the novel’s two main characters, and therefore its readers, into confronting the implications of their nonconformity, which in turn generates the ambiguous flashes of perception that briefly pierce the moral occult. In other words, Jude and Sue act as mutual catalysts—each has, previous to their meeting, been individually aware of social insufficiencies impeding their efforts at self-expression, but their interaction heightens this awareness even as it eventually proves incapable of offering solutions to their personal dilemmas. In general Jude’s recognitions are more easily attained, since the barriers blocking him are less internalized than those inhibiting Sue. For example, upon first arriving at Christminster and looking for employment at a local stonemason’s workyard, the narrator tells us “[f]or a moment there fell on Jude a true illumination; that here in the stone yard was a centre of effort as worthy as that dignified by the name of scholarly study within the noblest of the colleges. But he lost it under stress of his old idea” (Jude 85). It is his inability to sustain this moment of perception that is the problem here, and something similar happens after he receives the note from “T. Tetuphenay,” Master of “Biblioll College” (Jude 120), rejecting his university aspirations. After retiring to a bar and “toss[ing] off two or three glasses” he goes and stands at “the Fourways in the middle of the city” (Jude 120) and has another moment of insight, having fallen into thought on what struggling people like himself had stood at that Crossway, whom nobody ever thought of now. It had more history than the oldest college in the city . . . He began to see that the town life was a book of humanity infinitely more palpitating, varied, and compendious, than the gown life. These struggling men and women before him were the reality of Christminster, though they knew little of Christ or Minster. (Jude 120–121)
Although by the next morning Jude once again loses what he “began to see,” and instead “saw himself as a fool indeed” (Jude 122), the vision of inclusiveness he achieves here, in opposition to the exclusions of university
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admission and the class differences upon which it rests, will be at the core of his final obscure but nonetheless valid recognition of the text’s core ethical position. Sue moves him toward a more sustained understanding, and therefore a more direct penetration of the moral occult, because through her observations, as well as the extremity of their own experiences, they generate a melodrama that “refuses to content itself with repressions, the tonings-down, the half-articulations, the accommodations, and the disappointments of the real . . . [and which] insists that the ordinary may be the place for the instauration of significance.”39 An example of this occurs after Jude joins Sue at Melchester, she having left her Christminster employment as “an artist or designer of some sort in what was called an ecclesiastical warehouse” (Jude 88) in order to attend the teachers training school there. When, despite the announcement of her recent engagement to Phillotson, they decide to spend an evening together, Jude suggests a way to pass the time. “Shall we go and sit in the Cathedral?” he asked when their meal was finished. “Cathedral? Yes. Though I think I’d rather sit in the railway station,” she answered, a remnant of vexation still in her voice: “the Cathedral has had its day!” “How modern you are!” “So would you be if you had lived so much in the middle ages as I have done these last few years! The Cathedral was a very good place four or five centuries ago; but it is played out now . . . I am not modern, either. I am more ancient than mediævalism, if you only knew.” Jude looked distressed. (Jude 139—ellipses in the original)
Although he is not ready even yet to accept its implications, Sue’s comment acts as an encapsulation of Jude’s earlier fleeting awareness that the institutions embodying his educational/religious ambitions are essentially obsolete. Later she will push this even further, insisting to him that “ ‘you are one of the very men Christminster was intended for when the colleges were founded; a man with a passion for learning, but no money, or opportunities, or friends. But you were elbowed off the pavement by the millionaires’ sons . . . At present Christminster is pushing one way, and religion the other . . . It is a place full of fetichists and ghost-seekers’ ” (Jude 156). Sue’s unrestrained (melodramatic) statements punch through the “accommodations” of society, directing both Jude and the reader toward the perspective endorsed by the text, so that when he later declares “ ‘my
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doctrines and I begin to part company’ ” (Jude 225) there can be little doubt of the key role she has played in this development. Sue’s rejection of Jude’s designation of her as “modern,” and her desire to be thought of as a pagan “more ancient than mediævalism,” however, shows that she harbors fantasies of her own. Her belief that she wishes to, or is able to, live “ ‘[o]utside all laws except gravitation and germination’ ” (Jude 143) is challenged by Jude in much the same way as she challenged him. “You only think you like it; you don’t. You are quite a product of civilization,” said Jude . . . “Indeed I am not, Jude. I like reading and all that, but I crave to get back to the life of my infancy, and its freedom.” “Do you remember it so well? You seem to me to have nothing unconventional at all about you.” “O, haven’t I? You don’t know what’s inside me!” “What?” “The Ishmaelite.” “An urban miss is what you are.” (Jude 143–144)
Jude’s declaration that there is “nothing unconventional” about Sue is meant to provoke her, and is clearly not accurate; however, his perception that she is conditioned by “civilization” in ways that her self-designation as “The Ishmaelite” tries to avoid recognizing is very acute. The conflict generated by her feelings for him forces her into an awareness that, again, has wider implications than for her individual experience. Thus after she has married Phillotson, in order to stop the scandalous rumors circulating about her and Jude, she confesses to her new husband that “ ‘[o]f course I, of all people, ought not to have cared what was said, for it was just what I fancied I never did care for. But I was a coward—as so many women are—and my theoretic unconventionality broke down’ ” (Jude 233). Her resistance to society’s coercive power to determine a woman’s reputation through its evaluation and assignment of sexual impropriety, and thus to dictate her identity, is at the core of Sue’s attempts to maintain her sexual autonomy, and leads to more startling statements. Shortly afterward, in the same conversation, she presents a sensational argument asking that she and Phillotson separate. His sadly inadequate objection that “ ‘It is irregular’ ” is met by the following passionate outburst. “But I do ask it! Domestic laws should be made according to temperaments, which should be classified. If people are at all peculiar in character they have
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to suffer from the very rules that produce comfort in others! . . . Will you let me?” “But we married—”
“But you are committing a sin in not liking me.” “I do like you! But I didn’t reflect it would be—that it would be so much more than that . . . For a man and woman to live on intimate terms when one feels as I do is adultery, in any circumstances, however legal. There—I’ve said it!” (Jude 233–234—ellipses and italics in the original)
Sue’s radical claim that individual sensations and needs should take precedence over social institutions, including the central institution of monogamous marriage, and that she perceives more clearly than her culture what is lawful and what is sinful, directly reflects Hardy’s insistence that established standards be re-examined in the light of modern sensibilities. This moment of vision, which breaks through the moral occult and enunciates an important tenet supported by the text, is then embodied in Sue’s famously theatrical leap out of the window at Phillotson’s (unthinking) approach toward the matrimonial bed. Hardy’s brilliant use and then modification of the moral occult lies in his insistence that it is society’s unthinkingly conventional values that are in fact occluding true ethical behavior, and the melodramatic extremity of his characters’ response to, and struggle with, those values results in the recognition of their falsity. But, like Jude, Sue is unable to completely escape the codes she so vociferously criticizes, and this ambivalence will prove especially devastating later in the book. When, against all expectations, Phillotson does allow her to leave, and she joins Jude only to inform him that she does not intend to have sex with him either, she can only ask him to “ ‘[a]ssume that I haven’t the courage of my opinions’ ” (Jude 251), and this sense of her internal conflicts is reiterated and expanded upon when she subsequently attempts to explain more fully why she married her first husband: “But I haven’t the courage of my views, as I said before. 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.” (Jude 253—italics in the original)
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“What is the use of thinking of laws and ordinances,” she burst out, “if they make you miserable when you know you are committing no sin?”
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Although Jude, perhaps understandably, accuses her of special pleading, Sue’s revelation that she finds validation in the discourse that also oppresses her is a direct expression of her dilemma. Ingham summarizes the interpretive difficulty this creates when she notes that “Sue is presented as an opalescent figure whose contradictions have baffled critics,”40 so that her character remains occluded to the reader even as she helps that reader perceive the world around her more clearly, one more irony added to the text’s long list. That having been said, Ingham’s subsequent argument seems to provide as legitimate an explanation as any that is likely to be put forward: “Sue has advanced intellectually in a way not matched by her emotions because society reinforces its ideology fostering guilt. It is her conditioning to feel guilt that hinders and destroys Sue.”41 This emphasis on Sue’s emotions and feelings, this linking of psyche and body to create an affective unity, is foreshadowed by her earlier declaration that “ ‘curiosity to hunt up a new sensation always leads me into these scrapes’ ” (Jude 180). Hardy’s decision to construct this character through a representation of her externalized responses to sensations, the ones she seeks and the ones she has forced upon her, is his way of demonstrating women’s increased vulnerability in a society that encourages them to experience their subjectivity all but solely through a limiting corporeality. Predictably, a number of critics have found Hardy’s method in achieving this problematic, since it tends to suggest Jude’s inner evolution without providing an equivalently detailed internal portrait of Sue. Thus Judith Mitchell, while acknowledging that Sue “is an effective mouthpiece for much of Hardy’s polemic” and that “her physical appearance, her status as an aesthetic and sexual object, is de-emphasized,” nonetheless further asserts that she is “perceived from the outside rather than from the inside. We are never given access to her consciousness, so that she remains an enigma rather than a true subject.”42 But, once again, it is only if we accept the idea that Hardy is working within the realm of psychological realism that such a representation becomes a lesser form of characterization, and Mitchell herself quite correctly invokes the melodramatic mode as a way of explaining what the text achieves through this alternative approach to portraying its main female figure. In discussing Laura Mulvey’s ideas on cinematic melodrama in “Afterthoughts on ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,’ ” Mitchell notes the critic’s argument that in the “woman-oriented strand” of melodrama the heroine’s “conflicting desires” find expression in her choice between the hero and the villain, and that this situation is ultimately irresolvable because “although the male characters personify [her] dilemma, it is their terms that make and finally break her . . . [she is] unable to settle or find a ‘femininity’ in which she and the male world can meet.”43
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Mitchell then summarizes by stating “[i]n other words, there is no place for such a heroine either in the hero’s masculine symbolic or in the villain’s phallic, regressive rebellion against it,”44 an assertion that provides a clear direction to understanding the ways in which Hardy is modifying this formula for Jude. As my discussion of Desperate Remedies demonstrates, in that early melodrama Hardy’s plot illustrates Mulvey’s theory quite well, since Cytherea’s choice between Springrove and Manston is carefully constructed as a selection between different aspects of the same thing, leaving her with no significant autonomy at all. But a serious difference is generated when the two competing male characters become Jude and Phillotson. Does Phillotson even remotely match the qualities of a melodramatic villain? Indeed, can we even really speak of a competition when, after “winning” Sue by marrying her, he willingly releases her so that she can go to Jude, despite the social and emotional costs he pays? Sue’s return to him at the end of the story is hardly a triumph for him, either, despite his reversion to a conservative conventionality that is no long willing to “indulge one’s instinctive and uncontrolled sense of justice and right” but accepts leaving “crude loving-kindness [to] take care of itself ” (Jude 379), since he has a wife who finds him physically repulsive, and who we are told will not long survive their remarriage. Similarly, can Jude be constructed as a hero, since he singularly fails to save either himself or the woman he loves? My point here is that all three characters are victimized by a rigid set of gender codes that breaks each of them in different ways, so that there is no place for Jude or Sue or Phillotson in official social discourse except through what the narrator devastatingly describes as “the self-sacrifice of the woman on the altar of what she was pleased to call her principles” (Jude 389). When Sue remarries Phillotson, the ghastly charade of that discourse is then exposed once and for all by Jude’s drunken response after his own second marriage to Arabella: “ ‘It is true religion! Ha—ha—ha!’ ” (Jude 405). Mitchell’s statement that “such texts can be viewed as implicit protests against the cultural marginalization of the feminine, opening up an empathetic position with which the female reader/spectator can . . . align herself ”45 is certainly accurate, but needs to be expanded to include male readers as well, since both sexes are encouraged to recognize the multiple marginalizations being explored, and to develop an empathetic response to all of them. True, we are not given any glimpse of Sue’s interiority, but then neither are we given such a glimpse of Henchard’s in The Mayor of Casterbridge, and this does not render him any less sympathetic or that novel any less effective in achieving its rhetorical goals. It is worthwhile reiterating here Brooks’ idea that it is “delusive to seek an interior conflict, the ‘psychology of melodrama,’ because melodrama exteriorizes conflict and psychic structure, producing
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instead what we might call the ‘melodrama of psychology.’ ”46 Even Jude’s psychology is not seriously developed, since that is not Hardy’s purpose, and, although his perspective dominates the text, as two figures inhabiting a modernist melodrama and a sensationalist tragedy Sue and Jude’s characterizations are different variations within the same mode rather than indications of their author’s gender bias. Hardy’s willingness to discard completely the tenets of realism to advance his purpose is then demonstrated as flagrantly as possible through his introduction of Little Father Time into the novel, and into Jude and Sue’s relationship. It is difficult to disagree with Michael Hollington when he notes that “we must consider Father Time as a radical challenge to realist narrative practice,” since he is clearly correct in his further contention that the character “carries so many ostentatious associations with an abstract allegorical register”47 that he simply does not fit realist paradigms. Indeed, as Sally Shuttleworth argues, “Father Time . . . is less a child than a walking symbol,”48 and it is this quality that makes him especially available for use in the melodramatic mode, which readily encompasses emblematic figures in its discourse. Thus Jude’s reaction when suddenly informed about the existence of a son Arabella claims is his provides another sharp penetration of the moral occult, as he proclaims a direct challenge to some of his culture’s most basic values: “The beggarly question of parentage—what is it, after all? 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 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.” (Jude 288)
This ironic list of “virtues,” and their repudiation, illustrates Jude’s movement toward the awareness that moral worth must be searched for behind or beyond conventional platitudes, an awareness that, for a moment, is shared by his partner: “Sue jumped up and kissed Jude with passionate devotion. ‘Yes—so it is, dearest! And we’ll have him here!’ ” (Jude 288). Within the textual economy of this melodrama, Little Father Time functions as what Daniel R. Schwarz calls “a rhetorical, illuminating distortion,”49 revealing for both the characters and the reader the necessity of reforming the “mean exclusiveness” that is the true distortion of individual and social interaction. Determining more precisely what Little Father Time symbolizes in himself, however, is a more difficult matter. Hollington, at any rate, is very
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specific in making a negative assessment, since he flatly states “Little Father Time self-evidently has nothing whatever to do with modernity.”50 This claim rests on such textual elements as the novel’s observation that the character is “Age masquerading as Juvenility” (Jude 290), on Sue’s declaration that his “[h]is face is like the tragic mask of Melpomene” (Jude 294), and on her description of him as a “preternaturally old” boy (Jude 294), all of which seems to associate him with the past and separate him from the aggressive newness of the modern. Yet when Hollington takes his discussion further he weakens his own position with the observation that Little Father Time evokes “those images of the ‘superfluous man’ (in its Russian sense of alienated from all meaning and purpose in life, after Turgenev’s . . . Diary of a Superfluous Man.”51 It is just this embodied sense of alienation that does connect Little Father Time to modernity, not in its emphasis on relentless innovation and alteration, but in the existential angst this state of inescapable change may produce in some personalities. Schopenhauer’s influence on Hardy at this time is well documented and “one can clearly trace correlations between notes taken by Hardy from Schopenhauer’s Studies in Pessimism and the novel,”52 so that parts of Jude become a fictionalized exploration of the German philosopher’s protomodernist ideas. And this is most obvious in the grotesque sensation scene that so perturbed its original audience. In discussing Edumund Gosse’s review of the novel, Shuttleworth notes that he has no problem identifying what he specifically denotes as neurotic figures in the text, “including the child suicide, because they were staples in the discussions of the ailments of modern life . . . in periodicals, newspapers, and books of this time.”53 Little Father Time’s decision to kill his step-siblings and then himself is an enactment of his pessimistic sense that there is no place for them in the alienated modern world, something he makes clear when he asks Sue “ ‘It would be better to be out o’ the world than in it, wouldn’t it?’ ” (Jude 351). It is important, however, to remember that there are materialist as well as psychological reasons for his despair. Sue’s mistaken decision to answer his question in the affirmative, as if he were an adult, and her disastrous confession to him that she is pregnant again are brought on by her own loss of hope after being told that they must vacate their lodgings in the morning, largely because when her landlord discovers she is not married to Jude he does not want “ ‘such a woman’ ” (Jude 349) in his house. This expulsion of a fragile family once again invokes an ironic version of the moral occult, since the nameless landlord is, in his society’s view, well within his rights to act thus “correctly”; but of course in the text’s terms this is a profoundly callous and immoral decision that will have horrifying consequences.
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A shriek from Sue suddenly caused [Jude] to start round. He saw that the door of the room, or rather closet—which had seemed to go heavily upon its hinges as she pushed it back—was open . . . He looked in bewilderment around the room. At the back of the door were fixed two hooks for hanging garments, and from these the forms of the two youngest children were suspended, by a pieced of box-cord round each of their necks, while from a nail a few yards off the body of [Little Father Time] was hanging in a similar manner. An overturned chair was near the elder boy, and his glazed eyes were slanted into the room; but those of the girl and the baby boy were closed. (Jude 354)
Many members of Hardy’s Victorian audience were, understandably, appalled, not least because of the haunting defamiliarization of the scene. Children under threat were a staple of nineteenth-century melodrama, but in this tableau Hardy takes the conventions of the form and, by presenting a child as the source of deadly violence, provides a frozen moment almost too devastating to consider. The comfortable certainties of a popular culture form in which the jeopardy of children almost universally results in their rescue has been commandeered for a radically different purpose. The doctor who examines the bodies tells Jude that his son is one of a group of boys “springing up amongst us—boys of a sort unknown in the last generation—the outcome of new views of life. They seem to see all its terrors before they are old enough to have staying power to resist them” (Jude 355). In this catastrophic scene Little Father Time sensationally acts out his creator’s dark perception of what may happen if ethical behavior remains occluded into the new century. Sue’s traumatized response to the murder/suicide, and to the miscarriage that follows, is expressed through a self-punitive religious debasement defined in a very specific way. After declaring to Jude “ ‘We must conform! . . . All the ancient wrath of the Power above us has been vented upon us,’ ” and that “ ‘it is no use fighting against God,’ ” she concludes with a statement of complete defeat by invoking I Corinthians 4:9: “ ‘I am cowed into submission. I have no more fighting strength left; no more enterprise. I am beaten, beaten! . . . “We are made a spectacle unto the world, and to angels, and to men!” I am always saying that now!’ ” (Jude 361—ellipses in the original). Her sense of being reduced to an abject spectacle is the precise opposite of Arabella’s aggressive, individualistic
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The scene of melodramatic horror that greets Sue and Jude in the children’s bedroom the next day is, therefore, not only “a direct assault on the reader, a deliberate attack on our novel reading sensibilities,” 54 but also a repudiation through excess of the value system Hardy condemns.
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self-spectacle, and marks Sue’s regression into a destructive communality that can only be construed as a judgmental, all-encompassing surveillance. This in turn leads to a paradoxically sensational desire to deny and discipline the body, the sensual object that is the focus of the spectacle, because “ ‘self-abnegation is the higher road. We should mortify the flesh—the terrible flesh—the curse of Adam!’ ”(Jude 363), and, even more drastically, “ ‘Self-renunciation—that’s everything! I cannot humiliate myself too much. I should like to prick myself all over with pins and bleed out the badness that’s in me!’ ” (Jude 364). The text clearly presents this as a descent into pathology, a closing in of conformity and closing off of the glimmers of perception that have been achieved with great effort by this point in the story. Kristen Brady perceives Sue’s response as “a hysterical reversal that exceeds all her earlier inconsistencies,” and argues that “[t]he idea that motherhood is necessary for female mental stability is thus reinforced by the pathetic decline of Sue Bridehead—caused not by external social forces but by an irresolvable conflict between her own perverse nature and her weak female body.”55 I would suggest, however, that Sue’s repeated couching of her need for punishment in religious terms suggests that this is not a biological breakdown, but rather a cultural one, and that Hardy’s continued use of melodramatic excess here once again suggests a move into an emblematic criticism of this deadly discourse. Brooks insists that within melodrama “the hystericised body offers a key emblem . . . since it is a body pre-eminently invested with meaning, a body become the place for the inscription of highly emotional messages that cannot be written elsewhere, and cannot be articulated verbally,” while at the same time recognizing that “[t]he hysterical body is typically, of course, from Hippocrates through Freud, a woman’s body, and indeed a victimised woman’s body, on which desire has inscribed an impossible history, a story of desire in an impasse.”56 Sue’s destruction is not pathetic, but tragic, because the “impossible history” and impasse of desire inscribed on her body are the marks of a victimization defined by overwhelming external forces, not internal weakness, so that “the psychological level enhances the sense of unfairness and irrationality of suffering caused by society and philosophy.”57 Her decision to return to Phillotson, to remarry him and succumb to him sexually, is described by Dennis Taylor as “gothically horrible,”58 creating a situation that all but literally evokes one of sensation fiction’s common descriptions as domesticated gothic, while Jude’s own evaluation of it as “a fanatic prostitution” (Jude 381) confirms the social context of this sensationally extreme act of self-punishment. Jude’s desperate pleading with Sue not to leave may at first seem selfserving, since it is couched in terms of what will happen to him if she goes. However, at the core of his entreaty is the previous ethical perception he
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“O Sue!” said he with a sudden sense of his own danger. “Do not do an immoral thing for moral reasons! . . . Stay with me for humanity’s sake! . . . My two Arch Enemies you know—my weakness for womankind, and my impulse to strong liquor. Don’t abandon me to them, Sue, to save your own soul only! . . . Isn’t my safety worth a little sacrifice of dogmatic principle?” (Jude 373)
The explicit echo here of the “save-your-own-soul-ism” that Jude rejected when the two of them adopted Little Father Time emphasizes Sue’s mistake, in that she can no longer see beyond the narrow confines of a religious/social dogma that promises individual salvation through exclusionary conformity. Jude’s subsequent relapse into befuddled alcoholism and sexual debauchery, engineered by Arabella and resulting in their equally grotesque second marriage, provides the novel with a parodic temperance-melodrama conclusion. In this text, though, the negative example of the drunkard’s perdition serves not as a warning against the evils of drink, but as a searing commentary on the failed ethics of the Victorian world that surrounds him. As Jude says to Sue of their remarriages, at their last encounter before his death, “ ‘I was gin-drunk; you were creed-drunk’ ” (Jude 411), and the conflation of these two fatal types of intoxication suggests that there is little to choose between them. The novel’s final pages, whose goal according to Matz is to subject the reader “to an absolute assault on the senses,” and whose effect is to provide “a prolonged exercise in excruciation,”59 generate sensationalist tragedy by forcing those enduring Hardy’s grim plot into an extended confrontation with pain that comes very close to being unbearable. Jude’s realization that “ ‘a man confined to his room by inflammation of the lungs, a fellow who had only two wishes left in the world, to see a particular woman, and then to die, could neatly accomplish those two wishes at one stroke by taking [a] journey in the rain’ ” (Jude 413), leads to his suicide through pneumonia, and his final despairing lamentations from the Book of Job, punctuated by the uncaring celebrations of the Christminster Remembrance Week, serve as a final moment of melodramatic commentary.60 “Let the day perish wherein I was born, and the night in which it was said, There is a man child conceived!” (“Hurrah!”) “Let that day be darkness; let not God regard it from above, neither let the light shine upon it. Lo, let that night be solitary, let no joyful voice come therein.”
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attained by piercing the moral occult, so that the following passage is not just personal:
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(“Hurrah!”) “Why died I not from the womb? Why did I not give up the ghost when I came out of the belly?... For now should I have lain still and been quiet. I should have slept: then had I been at rest!”
“There the prisoners rest together; they hear not the voice of the oppressor... The small and the great are there; and the servant is free from his master. Wherefore is light given him that is in misery, and life unto the bitter in soul?” (Jude 426–427—ellipses and italics in the original)
Jude’s series of unanswerable, existential questions (ironically found in a scripture that can express them but can no longer provide the necessary consolatory answers) signifies the return to a moral occult denuded of any potential resolution. The modernist absurdity of this scene, with the “hurrahs” of the imperceptive holiday crowd providing the only response to the dying man’s profound nihilism, is Hardy’s bitter comment on the way in which “light,” an awareness that penetrates cultural occlusions and exposes the rigidity of accepted ideologies, is worse than useless to those in misery, since it increases their suffering without providing any succor. The decision to give the novel’s final words to Arabella, that skilled performer in the theater of modernity, only increases the sense that with Jude’s passing a crucially significant perceptiveness, obscured and flawed as it was, has been lost to the future. Her concluding comment on Sue, that “ ‘[s]he’s never found peace since she left [Jude’s] arms, and never will again till she’s as he is now!’ ” (Jude 431), is as insightful, and as limited, as all her other observations, since she has never really understood the bond that united them. Hardy, with this final exclamatory prediction of a death beyond the margins of the text, brings to its conclusion a sensation novel whose tragedy refuses even the ambivalent happy endings associated with that genre, and a modernist melodrama whose extremities leave its audience without any hint of a reassuring poetic justice. Characters such as Jude and Sue present foundational challenges to the Victorian status quo, revealing as they do the way modernity has “unbalanced the liberal formula for reconciling individual initiatives with the needs of social conformity,”61 while illustrating the harmful continuing power of older, exclusionary hierarchies. And an emblematic figure such as Little Father Time points forward not only to the alienated anxiety that comes with deracinated modernity, but also to the need of aggressively antirealist devices to adequately explore its implications. With Jude the Obscure Hardy exhausts the potentialities of the melodramatic mode in prose fiction. Its closure gives the sense of seeking
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(“Hurrah!”)
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“a total ending, the expression of an absolute silence,”62 a collapse of narrative possibility that denies the adequacy of plot, no matter how complex or affective, to confront and encompass human suffering. That the author who generated this radically excessive text would profess surprise at the extreme responses it provoked is as characteristic of him as the excess itself, and Jude’s continuing ability to shock and move readers is a testament to the power of the nineteenth-century popular-culture forms that pervade its structure and aesthetic—a power that Hardy wielded with consummate skill for 25 years, from the start of his novel-writing career to this, its final expression.
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Introduction 1. Thomas Hardy, The Life and Work of Thomas Hardy by Thomas Hardy, ed. Michael Millgate (London: Macmillan, 1994) 239. 2. Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess (1976; New Haven: Yale UP, 1995). 3. Elaine Hadley, Melodramatic Tactics: Theatricalized Dissent in the English Marketplace, 1800–1885 (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1995) 9. 4. Charles Lock, “Hardy and the Critics,” Palgrave Advances in Thomas Hardy Studies, ed. Phillip Mallett (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004) 25. 5. Brooks, Melodramatic Imagination, ix. 6. Brooks, Melodramatic Imagination, xvi. 7. To be fair to Brooks, he does indirectly acknowledge the legitimacy of Booth’s position, although he also insists that his different historical focus is necessary for his specific analytical purposes. See in particular Brooks, Melodramatic Imagination, 14. 8. Michael Booth, English Melodrama (London: Herbert Jenkins, 1965) 45. 9. Booth, English Melodrama, 52. 10. Hadley, Melodramatic Tactics, 3. 11. Hadley, Melodramatic Tactics, 11. 12. Michael Millgate, Thomas Hardy: A Biography Revisited (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2004) 7–8. 13. Donald Davidson, “The Traditional Basis of Thomas Hardy’s Fiction,” Hardy: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Albert J. Guerard (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1963) 15. 14. Originally published by Macmillan in two volumes, over the name of Florence Emily Hardy (Hardy’s second wife) as The Early Life of Thomas Hardy, 1840– 1891 (1928) and The Later Years of Thomas Hardy, 1892–1928 (1930). 15. Hardy, Life, 268. 16. Brooks, Melodramatic Imagination, 5. 17. Brooks, Melodramatic Imagination, 15. 18. Jil Larson briefly discusses Brooks in relation to Hardy in her Ethics and Narrative in the English Novel, 1880–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001). See in particular pp. 74–76.
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Notes
NOTES
19. Tom Gunning, “The Horror of Opacity: The Melodrama of Sensation in the Plays of André de Lorde,” Melodrama: Stage Picture Screen, eds. Jacky Bratton, Jim Cook, and Christine Gledhill (London: British Film Institute, 1994) 59–60. 20. Anastasia Nikolopoulou, “Historical Disruptions: The Walter Scott Melodramas,” Melodrama: The Cultural Emergence of a Genre, eds. Michael Hays and Anastasia Nikolopoulou (New York: St. Martin’s, 1996) 135. 21. Nikolopoulou, “Historical Disruptions,” 122–123. 22. Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller: Reflections on the Works of Nikolai Leskov,” Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1968) 87. 23. Thomas Hardy, Tess of the d’Urbervilles (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1988) 129. 24. Lock, “Hardy and the Critics,” 18. 25. Benjamin, “The Storyteller,” 109. 26. Benjamin, “The Storyteller,” 88. 27. Hadley, Melodramatic Tactics, 137. 28. Benjamin, “The Storyteller,” 85. 29. Mary Rimmer, “Hardy, Victorian Culture and Provinciality,” Palgrave Advances in Thomas Hardy Studies, ed. Phillip Mallett (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004) 135. 30. William Greenslade, “Critical Introduction,” Thomas Hardy’s ‘Facts’ Notebook: A Critical Edition, ed. William Greenslade (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004) xviii. 31. Hardy, Life, 29. 32. Millgate, A Biography Revisited, 48. 33. In Far from the Madding Crowd, Hardy has Sergeant Troy appear in “The Royal Hippodrome Performance of Turpin’s Ride to York and the Death of Black Bess.” Dick Turpin’s ride, one of the most famous incidents in the folktales surrounding this highwayman, is also an important element of the plot in Rookwood. Hardy’s allusion in FFMC may be to the novel, to the folktale, or to both, which further suggests his union of oral and print culture. Purdy and Millgate mention this link to Ainsworth in a note to Hardy’s letter to Stewart Marsh Ellis of May 4, 1913 (cf. Collected Letters, IV, 272). 34. Mathew Buckley, “Sensations of Celebrity: Jack Shepphard and the Mass Audience,” Victorian Studies 44.3 (2002): 429. 35. Carl J. Weber, “Ainsworth and Thomas Hardy,” Review of English Studies 17.66 (April 1941): 200. Weber argues that Chapter 37, “The Storm,” in Far from the Madding Crowd was directly influenced by Book II, Chapter I, “The Storm,” in Rookwood. See Weber, pp. 195–196. 36. Greenslade, ‘Facts’ Notebook, xix. 37. Greenslade, ‘Facts’ Notebook, xxii. 38. Sally Ledger, “Chartist Aesthetics in the Mid Nineteenth Century: Ernest Jones, a Novelist of the People,” Nineteenth-Century Literature 57.1 (June 2002): 46, 48. 39. Rachel Ablow, “Good Vibrations: The Sensationalization of Masculinity in The Woman in White,” Novel: A Forum on Fiction 37.1 (Spring 2003): 159.
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213
40. Lennart A. Björk, ed., The Literary Notebooks of Thomas Hardy, Vol. 1 (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan Press Ltd., 1985) 163–164. Minor alterations have been made to the text to represent Hardy’s abbreviations and underscorings. 41. See Winifred Hughes, The Maniac in the Cellar: Sensation Novels of the 1860s (New Jersey: Princeton UP, 1980); Thomas Boyle, Black Swine in the Sewers of Hampstead: Beneath the Surface of Victorian Sensationalism (New York: Viking, 1989); Lyn Pykett, The ‘Improper’ Feminine: The Women’s Sensation Novel and the New Woman Writing (New York: Routledge, 1992) and The Sensation Novel from The Woman in White to The Moonstone (Northcote: Northcote P, 1994); Ann Cvetkovich, Mixed Feelings: Feminism, Mass Culture, and Victorian Sensationalism (Chapel Hill, NC: Rutgers UP, 1992); Deborah Wynne, The Sensation Novel and the Victorian Family Magazine (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001); Kimberly Harrison and Richard Fantina, eds., Victorian Sensations: Essays on a Scandalous Genre (Columbus: Ohio State UP, 2006). 42. Cvetkovich, Mixed Feeling, 25. 43. Booth, English Melodrama, 30. 44. Pykett, The ‘Improper’ Feminine, 75–76. 45. Mikhail Bakhtin, “Epic and Novel: Towards a Methodology for the Study of the Novel,” The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: U of Texas P, 1981) 3. 46. Cvetkovich, Mixed Feelings, 15. 47. Kathleen Tillotson, “The Lighter Reading of the Eighteen-Sixties,” Introduction, The Woman in White (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1969) xv. 48. J. Hillis Miller, Thomas Hardy: Distance and Desire (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1970) 45. 49. Pykett, The Sensation Novel from The Woman in White to The Moonstone, 28. 50. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1978) 25. 51. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 138. 52. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 187. 53. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 170. 54. Lauren Goodlad, Victorian Literature and the Victorian State: Character and Governance in a Liberal Society (Baltimore: John Hopkins UP, 2003) x. 55. Goodlad, Victorian Literature and the Victorian State, 2. 56. Millgate, A Biography Revisited, 95. 57. Hardy, Life, 44, 45. 58. Michael R. Booth, Theatre in the Victorian Age (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1991) 7. 59. Michael R. Booth, Victorian Spectacular Theatre 1850–1910 (Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981) 30. 60. George Augustus Sala, “On the ‘Sensational’ in Literature and Art,” Belgravia IV (February 1868): 456–457. Hardy’s The Return of the Native was serialized in Belgravia from January to December 1878. 61. Millgate, A Biography Revisited, 95.
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NOTES
62. See Richard Nemesvari, “ ‘Judged by a Purely Literary Standard’: Sensation Fiction, Horizons of Expectation, and the Generic Construction of Victorian Realism,” Kimberly Harrison and Richard Fantina, eds., Victorian Sensations: Essays on a Scandalous Genre (Columbus: Ohio State UP, 2006) 15–28. 63. Simon Gatrell, “Wessex,” The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Hardy, ed. Dale Kramer (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999) 19. 64. Michael Millgate, Testamentary Acts: Browning, Tennyson, James, Hardy (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1992) 112. 65. Millgate, Testamentary Acts, 112–113. 66. Gatrell, “Wessex,” 29. 67. Millgate, Testamentary Acts, 118. 68. Millgate, Testamentary Acts, 119. 69. Thomas Hardy, “General Preface to the Novels and Poems,” Thomas Hardy’s Personal Writings, ed. Harold Orel (London: Macmillan, 1967) 44. 70. Hardy, General Preface in Personal Writings, 46. 71. Hardy, General Preface in Personal Writings, 44. 72. Hardy, General Preface in Personal Writings, 45. 73. Toru Sasaki, “A Laodicean as a Novel of Ingenuity,” Thomas Hardy: Texts and Contexts, ed. Phillip Mallett (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002) 51. 74. Hardy, General Preface in Personal Writings, 44. 75. Millgate, Testamentary Acts, 119. 76. Peter Widdowson, Hardy in History: A Study in Literary Sociology (London: Routledge, 1989) 73. 77. Linda Shires, “The Radical Aesthetic of Tess of the d’Urbervilles,” The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Hardy, ed. Dale Kramer (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999) 148. 78. Widdowson, Hardy in History, 54–55. 79. Patricia Ingham, “Introduction,” Desperate Remedies (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2003) xxvi.
Chapter 1 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.
Hardy, Life, 62. Hardy, Life, 62. Hardy, Life, 64. Millgate, A Biography Revisited, 108. Renate Muendel, George Meredith (Boston: Twayne, 1986) 7. Hadley, Melodramatic Tactics, 206. Hadley, Melodramatic Tactics, 214. Justin MacCarthy, “Novels with a Purpose,” Westminster Review, New Series vol. XXVI.1 (1864): 38–39. 9. Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot (1984; Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2000) 5. 10. Hardy, Life, 66. 11. Hardy, Life, 87.
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12. Richard H. Taylor, The Neglected Hardy: Thomas Hardy’s Lesser Novels (London: Macmillan, 1982) 6. 13. Catherine Neale, “Desperate Remedies: The Merits and Demerits of Popular Fiction,” Critical Survey 5.2 (1993): 116. 14. Judith R. Walkowitz. City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1992) 87. 15. Thomas Hardy, Desperate Remedies (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2003) 25. Further references to this text will be designated DR and will appear in the text in parenthesis. 16. Michael Millgate, Thomas Hardy: His Career as a Novelist (1971; London: Macmillan, 1994) 22. 17. The ambivalence of Desperate Remedies’ narrative closure foreshadows the similarly equivocal conclusions of Far from the Madding Crowd and A Laodicean. 18. Angus McLaren, The Trials of Masculinity: Policing Sexual Boundaries 1870– 1930 (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1997) 31. 19. Eliza Lynn Linton, “The Girl of the Period,” ‘Criminals, Idiots, Women, and Minors’: Victorian Writing by Women on Women, ed. Susan Hamilton (Peterborough: Broadview P, 1995) 172. 20. Neale, “Merits and Demerits of Popular Fiction,” 117. 21. Paul Turner, The Life of Thomas Hardy: A Critical Biography (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998) 24. 22. Rosemarie Morgan, “Bodily Transactions: Toni Morrison and Thomas Hardy in Literary Discourse,” Celebrating Thomas Hardy: Insights and Appreciations, ed. Charles P. C. Pettit (New York: St. Martin’s P, 1996) 148. 23. The implications of a “red and panting” Cytherea taking up her phallic candlestick and getting it “lit” also evoke a masculine arousal that would “fire” Miss Aldclyffe’s memory, even as she now moves to establish herself in the dominant, masculine role of seducer. 24. Morgan, “Bodily Transactions,” 150. 25. Morgan, “Bodily Transactions,” 150–151. 26. Patricia Ingham, in her note to this passage for the OUP edition of the novel, observes that “in 1912 Hardy added ‘You seem as if you were my own, own child!’ This and other changes . . . all suggest that by 1912 Hardy had begun to fear that this passage might be read as depicting a ‘Sapphic’ passion on the older woman’s part. Hence the attempt to stress its motherly nature, justified by Miss Aldclyffe’s love for Cytherea’s father” (n. 79, 396). Whether these revisions indicate a less aware, or simply less cautious, younger Hardy is impossible to discern, but they do indicate that such “Sapphic” readings are available. 27. The 1912 text changes “ ‘I love you better’ ” to “ ‘I love you more sincerely.’ ” Cf. Ingham, n. 82, 397. 28. Joe Fisher, The Hidden Hardy (London: Macmillan, 1992) 25–26. 29. Quoted in R. G. Cox ed., Thomas Hardy: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970) 5.
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30. In 1889 Hardy upgraded Springrove to “head draughtsman” from “head clerk.” Ingham notes that “[t]hroughout these early chapters the novel focuses on minute shades of social difference in class and shows great sensitivity to anything construable as snobbery” (n. 18, 390). 31. Patrick Roberts, “Patterns of Relationships in Desperate Remedies,” Thomas Hardy Journal 8.2 (May 1992): 56. 32. As part of the “Wessexization” of his novels Hardy later changed this location to “Lulwind Cove.” This process occurs throughout the text. 33. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia UP, 1985) 21. See also René Girard, Deceit, Desire, and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structure (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1972). 34. Neale, “Merits and Demerits of Popular Fiction,” 117. 35. Sedgwick, Between Men, 160. 36. Patricia Ingham, Thomas Hardy (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities P International, 1990) 33. 37. Sedgwick, Between Men, 36. 38. Kristin Brady, “Textual Hysteria: Hardy’s Narrator on Women,” The Sense of Sex: Feminist Perspectives on Hardy, ed. Margaret R. Higonnet (Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1993) 91. 39. David Ball, “Hardy’s Experimental Fiction,” English 25 (Spring 1986): 33. 40. Neale, “Merits and Demerits of Popular Fiction,” 119. 41. This focus on bigamous women in sensation fiction is in marked contrast to the notorious bigamy lawsuits that often attracted the Victorian press, most obviously the Yelverton case of 1858. The two most famous instances of male bigamy in sensation novels are those of Archibald Carlyle in East Lynne and Griffith Gaunt in Charles Reade’s novel of that name, the first inadvertent and the second intentional. 42. Fisher, Hidden Hardy, 29. 43. Patricia Ingham, Introduction, Desperate Remedies, by Thomas Hardy (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2003) xvi. 44. Neale, “Merits and Demerits of Popular Fiction,” 121. 45. Booth, Theatre in the Victorian Age, 160. 46. Jonathan Loesberg, “The Ideology of Narrative Form in Sensation Fiction,” Representations 13 (1986): 121. 47. Brady, “Textual Hysteria,” 94. 48. Jane Thomas, Thomas Hardy, Femininity and Dissent: Reassessing the ‘Minor’ Novels (London: Macmillan, 1999) 53–54. 49. Hardy, Life, 62.
Chapter 2 1. The serialization of The Pursuit of the Well-Beloved in 1892, revised and published in volume form as The Well Beloved in 1897, is in this critical formulation usually seen as a backward step in Hardy’s artistic development.
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2. Millgate, A Biography Revisited, 232. 3. Pamela Dalziel notes that “[a]s numerous critics have pointed out, there are obvious parallels among the stories of these three protagonists, particularly in respect of their exiles, relationships with a beloved ‘daughter,’ and selfwilled deaths.” See Pamela Dalziel, Introduction, The Mayor of Casterbridge by Thomas Hardy (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2004) xx. 4. Marjorie Garson, Hardy’s Fables of Integrity: Woman, Body, Text (Oxford: Clarendon, 1991) 95. 5. Philip Allingham, “Sensation Novel Elements in the London Graphic’s TwentyPart Serialisation of Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge (January Through May, 1886),” Thomas Hardy Year Book 31 (2001): 40. 6. Allingham, “Sensation Novel Elements,” 40, 41. 7. Thomas Hardy, The Mayor of Casterbridge (1987; Oxford: Oxford UP, 2004) 146. Further references to this text will be designated MC and will appear in the text in parenthesis. 8. John Goode, Thomas Hardy: The Offensive Truth (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988) 79. 9. Goode, The Offensive Truth, 79. 10. Sheila Berger, Thomas Hardy and Visual Structures: Framing, Disruption, Process (New York: New York UP, 1990) 120. 11. Dalziel, Introduction, xxix. 12. For a succinct description of the process by which Hardy reached the novel’s final full title of The Life and Death of the Mayor of Casterbridge: A Story of a Man of Character, see Simon Gatrell, Thomas Hardy and the Proper Study of Man (Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 1993) 68. 13. James Eli Adams, Dandies and Desert Saints: Styles of Victorian Masculinity (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1995) 4–5. 14. Hadley, Melodramatic Tactics, 4. 15. J. Hillis Miller, “Speech Acts, Decisions, and Community in The Mayor of Casterbridge,” Thomas Hardy and Contemporary Literary Studies, eds. Tim Dolin and Peter Widdowson (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004) 46–47. 16. Joanna Devereux, “Fools, Rogues, Lammigers, and Wanton Hussies: The Politics of Temperance in Hardy’s Fiction,” Human Shows: Essays in Honour of Michael Millgate, eds. Rosemarie Morgan and Richard Nemesvari (New Haven: Thomas Hardy Association P, 2000) 90. 17. Jane Lilienfeld, “ ‘I Could Drink a Quarter-Barrel to the Pitching’: The Mayor of Casterbridge Viewed as an Alcoholic,” The Language of Addiction, eds. Jane Lilienfeld and Jeffrey Oxford (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1999) 225. 18. Quoted in John W. Frick, Theatre, Culture and Temperance Reform in Nineteenth-century America (Cambridge: Cambridge UP 2003) 87. 19. Jeffrey D. Mason, “Poison It with Rum: Or, Validation and Delusion: Antebellum Temperance Drama as Cultural Method,” Pacific Coast Philology 25.1/2 (November 1990): 98.
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20. Frick, Theatre, Culture and Temperance Reform, 91. 21. Dale Kramer, Note to p. 107, The Mayor of Casterbridge by Thomas Hardy (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2004) 328–329. 22. Eliot’s explicit evocation of Sophocles’ Antigone in The Mill on the Floss might have encouraged Hardy to accept her ambivalent position on character and fate in his own treatment of the Oedipus story. 23. Thomas Hardy, “Hap,” in The Complete Poems of Thomas Hardy, ed. James Gibson (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1976), 9. 24. Gatrell, Hardy and the Proper Study of Man, 91, 93. 25. Brooks, Melodramatic Imagination, viii. 26. Gunning, “Opacity,” 50. 27. Juliet Grindle, “Compulsion and Choice in The Mayor of Casterbridge,” The Novels of Thomas Hardy, ed. Anne Smith (London: Vision, 1979) 96. 28. Gunning, “Opacity,” 51. 29. Brooks, Melodramatic Imagination, 16. 30. H. M. Daleski, Thomas Hardy and the Paradoxes of Love (Columbia and London: U of Missouri P, 1997) 105, 107. 31. Michael Valdez Moses, “Agon in the Marketplace: The Mayor of Casterbridge as Bourgeois Tragedy,” New Casebooks: The Mayor of Casterbridge, ed. Julian Wolfreys (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000) 190–191. 32. Hardy, Life, 185–186. 33. Dale Kramer, Thomas Hardy: The Forms of Tragedy (Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1975) 11. 34. Moses, “Agon in the Marketplace,” 190. 35. Hardy, Life, 183. 36. Irving Howe, Thomas Hardy (New York: Macmillan, 1967) 99. 37. Howe, Thomas Hardy, 84. 38. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity” (New York: Routledge, 1990) 25. 39. Elaine Showalter, “The Unmanning of The Mayor of Casterbridge,” Critical Approaches to the Fiction of Thomas Hardy, ed. Dale Kramer (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1979) 103. 40. Showalter, “Unmanning,” 103. 41. MS, v. 17. 42. Daleski, Paradoxes of Love, 110. 43. Sedgwick, Between Men, 86. 44. Kramer, Forms of Tragedy, 87. 45. It is significant that this visiting member of royalty is known for “his zealous promotion of designs for placing the art of farming on a more scientific footing” (MC 243), a commitment to modernization that reinforces Henchard’s obsolescence by evoking an earlier scene in which he mocks the newly developed horse-drill Farfrae has brought to Casterbridge, an implement that Farfrae knows will “ ‘revolutionise sowing’ ” by delivering each seed “ ‘straight to its intended place, and nowhere else whatever!’ ” (MC 158). That Henchard attempts to reaffirm his his significance in the community by intruding at this event establishes the inevitability of his defeat.
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46. Kramer, Forms of Tragedy, 82. 47. Joanna Devereux, Patriarchy and its Discontents: Sexual Politics in Selected Novels and Stories of Thomas Hardy (New York: Routledge, 2003) 62. 48. Robert E. Lougy, Inaugural Wounds: The Shaping of Desire in Five NineteenthCentury Narratives (Athens: Ohio UP, 2004) 27. 49. Showalter, “Unmanning,” 112. 50. Devereux, Patriarchy and Its Discontents, 62. 51. Dalziel, Introduction, xxiv. 52. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: Volume 1: An Introduction. Trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1990) 155–156. 53. Butler, Gender Trouble, 95. 54. Goode, The Offensive Truth, 93. 55. Roger Ebbatson, “Hardy and Class,” Palgrave Advances in Thomas Hardy Studies, ed. Phillip Mallett (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004) 130. 56. Kramer, Note to p. 266, The Mayor of Casterbridge by Thomas Hardy (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2004) 348. 57. Sigmund Freud, “The Uncanny,” in An Infantile Neurosis and Other Works. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. XVII. Trans. and ed. James Strachey (1927: repr. London: Hogarth and the Institute of Psycho-analysis, 1961) 233. 58. Freud, “The Uncanny,” 234. 59. Freud, “The Uncanny,” 234. 60. Freud, “The Uncanny,” 235. 61. Freud, “The Uncanny,” 236—(emphasis in the original). 62. Freud, “The Uncanny,” 236. 63. Freud, “The Uncanny,” 220—(emphasis in the original). 64. Freud, “The Uncanny,” 236. 65. Freud, “The Uncanny,” 238. 66. Freud, “The Uncanny,” 241. 67. In Reading for the Plot Brooks suggests that “[t]he return of the repressed—the repressed as knowledge of the self ’s other story, the true history of its misapprehended desire—forces a total revision of the subject’s relation to the orders within which it constitutes meaning” (129). 68. Brooks, Melodramatic Imagination, 35. 69. Brooks, Melodramatic Imagination, 35–36. 70. Howe, Thomas Hardy, 96. 71. Howe, Thomas Hardy, 99. 72. Judith Mitchell, “Hardy’s Female Reader,” The Sense of Sex: Feminist Perspectives on Hardy, ed. Margaret R. Higonnet (Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1993) 180. 73. Dalziel, Introduction, xxviii–xxix. 74. Kramer, Forms of Tragedy, 19. 75. Kramer, Forms of Tragedy, 19. 76. Hardy removed Henchard’s return to Casterbridge for Elizabeth-Jane’s wedding with the present of a caged goldfinch from the English first edition, only to restore the chapter in which this event occurs to the 1895 Osgood,
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77. 78. 79. 80. 81.
NOTES
McIlvaine edition. See Kramer, Note to pp. 297–303, The Mayor of Casterbridge by Thomas Hardy (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2004) 363. Gunning, “Opacity,” 51. Gunning, “Opacity,” 52–53. Gunning, “Opacity,” 59. Gunning, “Opacity,” 59–60. Hardy, Life, 265.
Chapter 3 1. Simon Gatrell, “Wessex,” The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Hardy, ed. Dale Kramer (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999) 19. 2. Linda Shires, Introduction, Far from the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2002) xiii. 3. Quoted in R. G. Cox, Thomas Hardy: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970) 32–33. The reviewer was not, apparently, aware of Hardy’s authorship of Desperate Remedies, and seems to be associating him only with Under the Greenwood Tree and/or A Pair of Blue Eyes, the novels that immediately preceded Far from the Madding Crowd. 4. Fisher, Hidden Hardy, 38–39. 5. George Wotten, Thomas Hardy: Towards a Materialist Criticism (Totawa, NJ: Barnes and Noble, 1985) 41, 43. 6. Penny Boumelha, “The Patriarchy of Class: Under the Greenwood Tree, Far from the Madding Crowd, The Woodlanders,” The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Hardy, ed. Dale Kramer (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999) 131—italics in the original. 7. Wotten, Materialist Criticism, 43. 8. Cvetkovich, Mixed Feelings, 7. 9. Cvetkovich, Mixed Feelings, 24. 10. Garson, Fables of Integrity, 46. 11. Peter Brooks, Body Work: Objects of Desire in Modern Narrative (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1993) 5–6. 12. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 155. 13. Howe, Thomas Hardy, 52, 55. 14. Howe, Thomas Hardy, 53. 15. Howe, Thomas Hardy, 53. 16. Brooks, Body Work, 15. 17. Brooks, Body Work, 15, 18. 18. Rosemarie Morgan, Women and Sexuality in the Novels of Thomas Hardy (London: Routledge, 1988) 36. 19. Thomas Hardy, Far from the Madding Crowd (1993; Oxford: Oxford UP, 2002) 13. Further references to this text will be designated FFMC, and will appear in the text in parenthesis. 20. The narrator’s introductory comment that “Woman’s prescriptive infirmity had stalked into the sunlight, which had clothed it in the freshness of originality” (FFMC 12) is inserted as an afterthought on the verso of MS
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21. 22.
23. 24.
25.
26. 27. 28.
29. 30. 31. 32.
33. 34.
35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41.
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f.6, and even this statement refuses to absolutely specifically identify that “infirmity.” Fisher, Hidden Hardy, 51. After Bathsheba’s social status is raised through the inheritance of her uncle’s farm we are told that, as she watches what are now “her” men working at the sheepwashing pool, she stands by “in a new riding-habit—the most elegant she had ever worn—the reins of her horse being looped over her arm” (FFMC 126). This camouflage of propriety, however, scarcely covers her continued flouting of gender norms, marked by her refusal to hire a male bailiff to supervise the tending of her flocks. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 170–171. Pamela Dalziel, “ ‘She matched his voice with her own wild passion’: Illustrating Far from the Madding Crowd,” Reading Thomas Hardy, ed. Charles P. C. Pettit (London: Macmillan, 1998) 5. Linda Shires, “Narrative, Gender, and Power in Far from the Madding Crowd,” The Sense of Sex: Feminist Perspectives on Hardy, ed. Margaret R. Higonnet (Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1993) 58. Booth, Victorian Spectacular Theatre, 1. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 10. Neither Gabriel nor Bathsheba is originally from Weatherbury, and while Troy is from the area, his profession as a soldier breaks his connection to it. Fanny, who starts out thoroughly “rooted” in her position, is literally forced to walk away from it due to her illicit relationship with him. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 170. The last sentence of this passage was inserted later. It appears on the verso of MS f. 58. Daryl Ogden, “Bathsheba’s Visual Estate: Female Spectatorship in Far from the Madding Crowd,” Journal of Narrative Technique 23.1 (1993): 3. William Mistichelli, “Androgyny, Survival, and Fulfillment in Thomas Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd,” Modern Language Studies 18.3 (Summer 1988): 59. Devereux, Patriarchy and its Discontents, 25. Unsigned Review, Punch, February 1892. Quoted in Thomas Hardy: Critical Assessments, ed. Graham Clark (Mountfield: Helm Information, 1993) 201–202. This negative reflection on Boldwood is another later introduction, and is an interlined insertion on MS f. 2–98. In the original MS chapter heading Troy is identified as a “juggler” (f. 2–128). Rosemarie Morgan, Cancelled Words: Rediscovering Thomas Hardy (New York: Routledge, 1992) 21. Angus McLaren, The Trials of Masculinity: Policing Sexual Boundaries 1870– 1930 (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1997) 59. Mistichelli, “Androgyny, Survival, and Fulfillment,” 61. J. B. Bullen, The Expressive Eye: Fiction and Perspective in the Work of Thomas Hardy (Oxford: Clarendon P, 1986) 85. Shires, “Narrative, Gender, and Power,” 54.
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42. McLaren, Trials of Masculinity, 87. 43. Susan Beegel, “Bathsheba’s Lovers: Male Sexuality in Far from the Madding Crowd,” Sexuality and Victorian Literature, ed. Don Richard Cox (Knoxville: U of Tennessee P, 1984) 111. 44. This chapter, written by Hardy on the Cornhill proofsheets, was a late addition to the text, and may represent the intervention of Leslie Stephen, who was concerned about the response of his Victorian audience to the overt impropriety of Fanny and Troy’s relationship. 45. McLaren, Trials of Masculinity, 87. 46. Mistichelli, “Androgyny, Survival, and Fulfillment,” 60. 47. Perry Meisel, Thomas Hardy: The Return of the Repressed (New Haven: Yale UP, 1972) 48. 48. Beegel, “Bathsheba’s Lovers,” 122. 49. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 177. 50. Morgan, Cancelled Words, 137. 51. Goode, The Offensive Truth, 29. 52. Shires, Introduction, xxx. 53. See Goode, The Offensive Truth, 29 and Shires, Introduction, xxx. 54. Cvetkovich, Mixed Feelings, 111. 55. The Oxford World’s Classics edition restores Hardy’s manuscript readings in this chapter. 56. Gatrell, Hardy the Creator, 17. 57. Ellen Bayuk Rosenman, “ ‘Mimic Sorrows’: Masochism and the Gendering of Victorian Melodrama,” Studies in the Novel 35.1 (Spring 2003): 22. 58. Rosenman, “Mimic Sorrows,” 23–24. 59. Rosenman, “Mimic Sorrows,” 26. 60. Rosenman, “Mimic Sorrows,” 25. 61. Brooks, Melodramatic Imagination, 20. 62. Garson, Fables of Integrity, 31. 63. Morgan, Cancelled Words, 44. 64. Garson, Fables of Integrity, 41. 65. Rosenman, “Mimic Sorrows,” 26. 66. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 187. 67. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 16–17. 68. Shires, “Narrative, Gender, and Power,” 64. 69. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 26–27. 70. Hadley, Melodramatic Tactics, 12. 71. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 217. 72. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 25.
Chapter 4 1. Thomas Hardy, “Preface,” A Laodicean. 1912. (New York: AMS P, 1984) vii. 2. Hardy, Life, 149–150. 3. Jane Gatewood, “Introduction,” A Laodicean (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1991) xvi.
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4. Arthur McDowall, Thomas Hardy: A Critical Study (London: Faber and Faber, 1931) 7. 5. McDowall, Thomas Hardy, 103–104. 6. Howe, Thomas Hardy, 69. 7. Taylor, Neglected Hardy, 110–111. 8. Thomas Postlewait, “From Melodrama to Realsim: The Suspect History of American Drama,” Melodrama: The Cultural Emergence of a Genre, eds. Michael Hayes and Anastasia Nikolopoulou (New York: St. Martin’s P, 1996) 54. 9. Thomas Hardy, A Laodicean (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1991) 50. Further references to this text will be designated L, and will appear in the text in parentheses. 10. Fisher, Hidden Hardy, 100–101. 11. Goodlad, Victorian Literature and the Victorian State, 2. 12. Anna Maria Jones, Problem Novels: Victorian Fiction Theorizes the Sensational Self (Columbus: Ohio State UP, 2007) 14. 13. Jones, Problem Novels, 15, 23. 14. Thomas, Femininity and Dissent, 102. 15. Peter Widdowson, “Hardy’s ‘Quite Worthless’ Novel: A Laodicean,” On Thomas Hardy: Late Essays and Earlier (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998) 111. 16. Thomas, Femininity and Dissent, 103. 17. Goodlad, Victorian Literature, 14. 18. Goodlad, Victorian Literature, 14. 19. Jay Clayton, Charles Dickens in Cyberspace: The Afterlife of the Nineteenth Century in Postmodern Culture (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2003) 70. 20. Jones, Problem Novels, 16. 21. Keep, Christopher, “ ‘An Unintelligible Language’: Telegraphy and Technological Fetishism in A Laodicean,” unpublished paper delivered at the Hardy at Yale conference, June 16, 2007. 22. Clayton, Dickens in Cyberspace, 73–74. 23. Iwan Rhys Morus, “The Electric Ariel: Telegraphy and Commercial Culture in Early Victorian England,” Victorian Studies, 39.3 (1996): 339–340. 24. Quoted in Morus, 339. 25. Roger Ebbatson, “A Laodicean: Hardy and the Philosophy of Money,” Thomas Hardy and Contemporary Literary Studies, eds. Tim Dolin and Peter Widdowson (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004) 85. 26. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 216. 27. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 209. 28. Devereux, Patriarchy and Its Discontents, 46. 29. In what follows it might be argued that I do not sufficiently distinguish between blushing and flushing, but that conflation is deliberate. The point of my discussion is that a reddened face indicating intense bodily response opens out possibilities of interpretation that preclude such a straightforward distinction, and that indeed Hardy is careful not to specify the ostensible difference between these emotional signifiers.
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30. John Donne, Of the Progress of the Soul: The Second Anniversary, John Donne: The Complete English Poems, ed. A. J. Smith (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1971) 293–294, ll. 241–246. 31. Ruth Bernard Yeazell, Fictions of Modesty: Women and Courtship in the English Novel (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1991) 74. 32. William A. Cohen, “Faciality and Sensation in Hardy’s The Return of the Native,” PMLA 121.1 (March 2006): 439. 33. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, vol.2 of Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1987) 178, 181. 34. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 168. 35. Cohen, “Faciality,” 439, 443. 36. Yeazell, Fictions of Modesty, 67. 37. Cohen, “Faciality,” 439. 38. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 190. 39. McDowall, Thomas Hardy, 57, 104. 40. Brooks, Melodramatic Imagination, xi. 41. Giles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, Dialogues II, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (New York: Columbia UP, 2002) 41. 42. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 171. 43. Deleuze and Parnet, Dialogues II, 49. 44. Jil Larson, Ethics and Narrative in the English Novel, 1880–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001) 70.
Chapter 5 1. Hardy, Life, 106–107. 2. Thomas Hardy, Preface. The Hand of Ethelberta. Further references to this text will be designated HE and will appear in the text in parentheses. 3. George Wing, “ ‘Forbear, Hostler, Forbear!’: Social Satire in The Hand of Ethelberta,” Studies in the Novel 4.4 (Winter: 1972): 568, 578. 4. Robert Schweik, “Hardy’s ‘Plunge in a New and Untried Direction’: Comic Detachment in The Hand of Ethelberta,” English Studies 83.3 (2002): 240. 5. Widdowson, Hardy in History, 178, 182—italics in the original. 6. Taylor, Neglected Hardy, 75. 7. Andrew Radford, “Hardy’s Subversion of Social Comedy in The Hand of Ethelberta,” The Thomas Hardy Journal XVI.2 (May 2000): 64–65. 8. Hardy, Life, 105. 9. Loesberg, Ideology of Narrative Form, 117. 10. Hadley, Melodramatic Tactics, 84. 11. Judith R. Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight, 50. 12. Kimberley Reynolds and Nicola Humble, Victorian Heroines: Representations of Femininity in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Art (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993) 102. 13. Widdowson, Hardy in History, 162—italics in the original.
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14. Cvetkovich, Mixed Feelings, 24. 15. Thomas, Femininity and Dissent, 85. 16. Anonymous, “Fast Young Ladies,” Punch, or the London Charivari 39 (18 August 1860): 67. 17. Schweik, “Comic Detachment,” 247. 18. Widdowson, Hardy in History 187–188. 19. Tim Dolin, “Introduction,” The Hand of Ethelberta, ed. Thomas Hardy (London: Penguin, 1996) xxxix. 20. Hadley, Melodramatic Tactics, 71. 21. Taylor, Neglected Hardy, 65. 22. Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle. Trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York: Zone Books, 1995) 18–19—emphasis in the original. 23. Widdowson, Hardy in History, 183. 24. Fisher, Hidden Hardy, 75. 25. Penny Boumelha, “ ‘A Complicated Position for a Woman’: The Hand of Ethelberta,” The Sense of Sex: Feminist Perspectives on Hardy, ed. Margaret R. Higonnet (Urbana and Chicago: U of Illinois P, 1993) 248. 26. Widdowson, Hardy in History, 187. 27. Cf. Tess of the d’Urbervilles, when Tess meets Angel after she has become Alec’s mistress once again: “ ‘Too late, too late!’ she said . . . in the impatience of a person whose tortures cause every instant to seem an hour” (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2008), 400. 28. Giles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, Dialogues II, 49. 29. Dolin, Introduction, xxi. 30. Jones, Problem Novels, 16.
Chapter 6 1. Millgate, Biography Revisited, 340. 2. Anonymous Review, Bookman, January 1896. Quoted in Thomas Hardy: Critical Assessments. Ed. Graham Clarke. Vol. 1: The Contemporary Response (The Banks, Mountfield: Helm Information, 1993) 268. 3. Margaret Oliphant, “The Anti-Marriage League,” Blackwood’s Magazine, January 1896. Quoted in Thomas Hardy: The Critical Heritage. Ed. R. G. Cox (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970) 257. 4. Millgate, Biography Revisited, 341. 5. Anonymous Review, Daily Telegraph, November 1, 1895. Quoted in Thomas Hardy: Critical Assessments. Ed. Graham Clarke. Vol. 1: The Contemporary Response (The Banks, Mountfield: Helm Information, 1993) 229. 6. Anonymous Review, Saturday Review, February 8, 1896. Quoted in Thomas Hardy: Critical Assessments. Ed. Graham Clarke. Vol. 1: The Contemporary Response (The Banks, Mountfield: Helm Information, 1993) 274. 7. Havelock Ellis, “Concerning Jude the Obscure,” Savoy Magazine, October 1896. Quoted in Thomas Hardy: The Critical Heritage. Ed. R. G. Cox (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970) 306, 314.
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NOTES
8. 9. 10. 11.
12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37.
38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43.
NOTES
Ellis, “Concerning Jude the Obscure,” qtd. in Cox, 307. Ellis, “Concerning Jude the Obscure,” qtd. in Cox, 307. Brooks, Melodramatic Imagination, 35. Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1985) xxxiii. Further references to this text will be designated Jude, and will appear in the text in parentheses. Fisher, Hidden Hardy, 175–176, 182. Aaron Matz, “Terminal Satire and Jude the Obscure,” ELH 73.2 (2006): 527— emphasis in the original. Matz, “Terminal Satire,” 527. Brooks, Melodramatic Imagination, 20. K. M. Newton, “Modernising Tragedy in Hardy’s Later Fiction,” Thomas Hardy Journal XXIII (Autumn 2007): 148. Kramer, Forms of Tragedy, 155, 161. Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight, 87. Cvetkovich, Mixed Feelings, 5. Gilles Deleuze, Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza, trans. Martin Joughin (New York: Zone Books, 1992) 221–222—italics in the original. Newton, “Modernising Tragedy,” 146. Garson, Fables of Integrity, 160. Peter Bailey, Popular Culture and Performance in the Victorian City (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998) 11. See Chapter VIII of Far from the Madding Crowd and Phase I: IV of Tess. Bailey, Popular Culture, 154. Bailey, Popular Culture, 154. Bailey, Popular Culture, 156—emphasis in the original. Bailey, Popular Culture, 171. Bailey, Popular Culture, 157. Newton, “Modernising Tragedy,” 154. Newton, “Modernising Tragedy,” 154–155. Gunning, “Opacity,” 52. Sherryl Vint, Animal Alterity: Science Fiction and the Question of the Animal (Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 2010) 34. Vint, Animal Alterity, 13. Debord, Society of the Spectacle, 17. Devereux, “Politics of Temperance,” 106. For a brief discussion of this issue see Dale Kramer, “Hardy and Readers: Jude the Obscure,” The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Hardy, ed. Dale Kramer (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999) 169–171. Patricia Ingham. Thomas Hardy (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2003) 148. Brooks, Melodramatic Imagination, ix. Ingham, Thomas Hardy, 149. Ingham, Thomas Hardy, 152. Mitchell, “Hardy’s Female Readers,” 179–180. Mitchell, “Hardy’s Female Readers,” 185.
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44. 45. 46. 47.
48.
49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55.
56. 57. 58.
59. 60. 61. 62.
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Mitchell, “Hardy’s Female Readers,” 185. Mitchell, “Hardy’s Female Readers,” 185. Brooks, Melodramatic Imagination, 35. Michael Hollington, “Story, History, Allegory: Some Ironies of Jude the Obscure from a Benjamin Perspective,” Thomas Hardy and Contemporary Literary Studies, eds. Tim Dolin and Peter Widdowson (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004) 111, 112. Sally Shuttleworth, “ ‘Done because we are too menny’: Little Father Time and Child Suicide in Late-Victorian Culture,” Thomas Hardy: Texts and Contexts, ed. Phillip Mallett (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002) 138. Daniel R. Schwarz. Reading the Modern British and Irish Novel, 1890–1830 (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005) 44. Hollington, “Story, History, Allegory,” 112. Hollington, “Story, History, Allegory,” 113. Shuttleworth, “Little Father Time and Suicide,” 136. Shuttleworth, “Little Father Time and Suicide,” 137. Shuttleworth, “Little Father Time and Suicide,” 133. Kristen Brady, “Textual Hysteria: Hardy’s Narrator on Women,” The Sense of Sex: Feminist Perspectives on Hardy, ed. Margaret R. Higonet (Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1993) 87–106. Brooks, “Melodrama, Body, Revolution,” 22. Kramer, “Hardy and Readers,” 178. Dennis Taylor, “Jude the Obscure and English National Identity: The Religious Striations of Wessex,” A Companion to Thomas Hardy, ed. Keith Wilson (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009) 344–363. Matz, “Terminal Satire,” 535. See Brooks’ earlier comment, note 10. The biblical quotations from Job were added in the Osgood, McIlvaine edition, and are not present in earlier versions of the novel. Bailey, Popular Culture, 21. Matz, “Terminal Satire,” 544.
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——. Reading Thomas Hardy. Ed. Charles P. C. Pettit. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1998. Postlewait, Thomas. “From Melodrama to Realism: The Suspect History of American Drama.” In Melodrama: The Cultural Emergence of a Genre, edited by Michael Hayes and Anastasia Nikolopoulou, 39–60. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996. Pykett, Lyn. The ‘Improper’ Feminine: The Women’s Sensation Novel and the New Woman Writing. London: Routledge, 1992. ——. The Sensation Novel from The Woman in White to The Moonstone. Horndon, Tavistock, Devon: Northcote Press, 1994. Radford, Andrew. “Hardy’s Subversion of Social Comedy in The Hand of Ethelberta.” The Thomas Hardy Journal XVI.2 (May 2000): 63–70. Reynolds, Kimberley, and Nicola Humble. Victorian Heroines: Representations of Femininity in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Art. London: Harvester Wheatsheaf Books, 1993. Rimmer, Mary. “Hardy, Victorian Culture and Provinciality.” In Palgrave Advances in Thomas Hardy Studies, edited by Phillip Mallett, 133–155. Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. Roberts, Patrick. “Patterns of Relationships in Desperate Remedies.” The Thomas Hardy Journal 8.2 (May 1992): 50–57. Rosenman, Ellen Bayuk. “ ‘Mimic Sorrows’: Masochism and the Gendering of Victorian Melodrama.” Studies in the Novel 35.1 (Spring 2003): 22–43. Sala, George Augustus. “On the ‘Sensational’ in Literature and Art.” Belgravia IV (February 1868): 456–457. Sasaki, Toru. “A Laodicean as a Novel of Ingenuity.” In Thomas Hardy: Texts and Contexts, edited by Phillip Mallett, 49–63. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002. Schwarz, Daniel R. Reading the Modern British and Irish Novel, 1890–1830. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2005. Schweik, Robert. “Hardy’s ‘Plunge in a New and Untried Direction’: Comic Detachment in The Hand of Ethelberta.” English Studies 83.3 (2002): 239–252. Shires, Linda. Introduction to Far from the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy, xi–xxx. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. ——. “Narrative, Gender, and Power in Far from the Madding Crowd.” In The Sense of Sex: Feminist Perspectives on Hardy, edited by Margaret R. Higonnet, 49–65. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993. ——. “The Radical Aesthetic of Tess of the d’Urbervilles.” In The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Hardy, edited by Dale Kramer, 145–163. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Showalter, Elaine. “The Unmanning of The Mayor of Casterbridge.” In Critical Approaches to the Fiction of Thomas Hardy, edited by Dale Kramer, 99–115. London and Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1979. Shuttleworth, Sally. “ ‘Done because we are too menny’: Little Father Time and Child Suicide in Late-Victorian Culture.” In Thomas Hardy: Texts and Contexts, edited by Phillip Mallett, 133–55. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002. Smith, A. J., ed. John Donne: The Complete English Poems. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1971.
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Smith, Anne, ed. The Novels of Thomas Hardy. London: Vision, 1979. Taylor, Dennis. “Jude the Obscure and English National Identity: The Religious Striations of Wessex.” In A Companion to Thomas Hardy, edited by Keith Wilson, 345–363. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009. Taylor, Richard H. The Neglected Hardy: Thomas Hardy’s Lesser Novels. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1982. Thomas, Jane. Thomas Hardy, Femininity and Dissent: Reassessing the ‘Minor’ Novels. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1999. Tillotson, Kathleen. “The Lighter Reading of the Eighteen-Sixties.” Introduction to The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1969. Turner, Paul. The Life of Thomas Hardy: A Critical Biography. Oxford: Blackwell, 1998. Vint, Sherryl. Animal Alterity: Science Fiction and the Question of the Animal. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2010. Walkowitz, Judith R. City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. Weber, Carl J. “Ainsworth and Thomas Hardy.” The Review of English Studies 17.66 (April 1941): 193–200. Widdowson, Peter. Hardy in History: A Study in Literary Sociology. London: Routledge, 1989. ——. “Hardy’s ‘Quite Worthless’ Novel: A Laodicean.” In On Thomas Hardy: Late Essays and Earlier, 93–114. Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1998. ——. On Thomas Hardy: Late Essays and Earlier. Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1998. Wilson, Keith, ed. A Companion to Thomas Hardy. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009. Wing, George. “ ‘Forbear, Hostler, Forbear!’: Social Satire in The Hand of Ethelberta.” Studies in the Novel 4.4 (Winter: 1972): 568–579. Wolfreys, Julian, ed. New Casebooks: The Mayor of Casterbridge. Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000. Wotten, George. Thomas Hardy: Towards a Materialist Criticism. Totawa, NJ: Barnes and Noble Press, 1985. Wynne, Deborah. The Sensation Novel and the Victorian Family Magazine. Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001. Yeazell, Ruth Bernard. Fictions of Modesty: Women and Courtship in the English Novel. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991.
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A Laodicean (Hardy) baptism scene, 126–29 blushing in, 138–43, 145 circumstances of composition, 121–23 criticism of, 21, 123–24 Desperate Remedies and, 121, 123–24, 129 Far from the Madding Crowd and, 84, 120, 125 gaze in, 124, 126–27, 130–31, 135–38 gender and, 126–31, 135, 146 Mayor of Casterbridge and, 123–24 phrenology in, 140 sensation fiction and, 123, 125–26, 130 tattoos in, 144–46 telegraph in, 129, 131–35, 138–39, 141, 144, 146 Ablow, Rachel, 10 Adams, James Eli, 52–53 After Dark (Boucicault), 17 Ainsworth, Harrison, 8–9 alcohol, 53–54, 195, 207 Allingham, Philip, 49–50 “Anti-Marriage League, The” (Oliphant), 179 antirealism, 115, 143, 146, 178, 208 see also realism Aurora Floyd (Braddon), 10–11, 43, 89–90, 118, 120 Bailey, Peter, 187–88 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 13 Ball, David, 42 Beegel, Susan, 105, 108
Benjamin, Walter, 6–8, 10 bigamy, 9, 25, 39, 41, 43, 89, 180 Blomfield, Arthur, 10, 15 blushing in Far from the Madding Crowd, 87, 90 in A Laodicean, 138–43, 145 Body, see human body Body Work: Objects of Desire in Modern Narrative (Brooks), 86 Booth, Michael, 3, 45, 93 Boucicault, Dion, 17, 53 Boumelha, Penny, 85, 171 Braddon, Mary Elizabeth, 10–11, 13, 31, 43, 84, 89, 160, 180 Brady, Kristin, 41, 46, 206 Brooks, Peter on decline of melodrama, 79 on human body in fiction, 86–87, 206 on melodramatic drives, 144 Melodramatic Imagination, 1 Meredith and, 26 “moral occult” and, 5, 56–58, 183 omission of Hardy from study of melodrama, 1–3 on pattern of melodrama, 114 on psychology in melodrama, 202 on theater and melodrama, 76–77 on tragedy and melodrama, 181 Bullen, J.B., 103 Butler, Judith, 61, 62 capitalism, 7, 14, 28, 51, 53, 94–95, 116, 195 Chapman, Frederick, 25–26
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cinematic melodrama, 201 class, see social class Clayton, Jay, 129, 133 Cohen, William A., 140, 142–43 Coleridge, Samuel, 5 Collins, Wilkie, 10–11, 13, 21, 26, 31, 180 courtship, 36, 65, 98, 154–56, 159, 170, 176 Cvetkovich, Ann, 11, 13, 85, 110, 159, 185 Daleski, H.M., 59, 64 Dalziel, Pamela, 70, 78, 91 Davidson, Donald, 4, 7 Debord, Guy, 165, 194 Deleuze, Gilles, 140, 142, 144–45, 146, 175, 185 Desperate Remedies (Hardy) A Laodicean and, 121, 123–24, 129 bedroom scene, 31–32 “calculus of power” in, 37 conclusion, 44–46 Cytherea Aldclyffe, 28–35, 38, 40–41, 43, 45, 50, 66, 155, 158 Far from the Madding Crowd and, 84, 99, 116 gender and, 27, 29, 34, 36, 40–43, 46 Hand of Ethelberta and, 155, 158, 169 identity and, 39–43 Jude the Obscure and, 202 marginalization of, 19, 21 Mayor of Casterbridge and, 50–51, 60–61, 66 melodrama and, 46–47 Meredith on, 25–27 Oedipal injury in, 35–38 “organ scene” in, 43–45 patriarchy and, 33–34 power and, 39–41 as sensation fiction, 25–28 sexuality and, 31–33 Devereux, Joanna, 53, 68, 70, 98, 195 Devil’s Elixir, The (Hoffmann), 74
Dolin, Tim, 164, 176 Donne, John, 139 East Lynne (Wood), 10, 12, 26–27 Ebbatson, Roger, 72, 135 Eliot, George, 10, 26, 54–55 Ellis, Havelock, 180–81 empowerment, 7, 38, 40, 43, 97, 103, 114–16, 124, 147, 188 faciality, 141–46 Far from the Madding Crowd (Hardy) Bathsheba, 11, 86–92, 95–120, 124–26, 129–30, 133–35, 137, 139, 148 critical response to, 83–84 discipline and, 85–86 “discourse of affect” in, 85 Gabriel Oak, 41, 56, 84, 91–92, 94–96, 107–10, 113, 115–19, 124, 126, 128–29, 137, 139, 144, 148 Hand of Ethelberta and, 165, 169 Howe on, 86–87 Jude the Obscure and, 187, 194 Mayor of Casterbridge and, 49 gaze in, 87, 101–2, 104–5, 107, 109, 113–15, 118 social criticism in, 84–85 femininity A Laodicean and, 129 Desperate Remedies and, 29, 40, 42–43, 46 Far from the Madding Crowd and, 88, 92, 104, 110, 114 Hand of Ethelberta and, 161 identity and, 61 marginalization of, 201–2 Mayor of Casterbury and, 61–63, 65–66, 70, 72 Victorian society and, 157 Ferry, Benjamin, 10 Fisher, Joe, 33, 45, 84, 124, 170, 182 Foucault, Michel, 14–15, 70–71, 91, 93, 117, 125 Freud, Sigmund, 2, 73–77, 206 Frick, John W., 54
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Garson, Marjorie, 49, 85, 115, 186 Gatewood, Jane, 122 Gatrell, Simon, 18, 54–55, 111 gaze in A Laodicean, 124, 126–27, 130–31, 135–38 in Far from the Madding Crowd, 85, 87, 101–2, 104–5, 107, 109, 113–15, 118 in Hand of Ethelberta, 165 Hardy’s use of, 14 in Jude the Obscure, 189, 192 in Mayor of Casterbridge, 74 gender A Laodicean and, 126–31, 135, 146 Desperate Remedies and, 27, 29, 34, 36, 40–43, 46 Far from the Madding Crowd and, 87, 89, 91, 93, 96–97, 100–1, 103, 105, 112, 114–15, 118 Hand of Ethelberta and, 154, 162, 175, 177 identity and, 61–62, 66–67, 116, 160, 199 Jude the Obscure and, 195–96, 202–3 Mayor of Casterbridge and, 61–62, 64, 66, 70–71, 79 sensation fiction and, 12–13 see also femininity; masculinity Girard, René, 37 Goode, John, 51, 71, 110 Goodlad, Lauren, 15, 128 Greenslade, William, 8–9 Grindle, Juliet, 57, 59 Gunning, Tom, 6, 56, 79, 190 Hadley, Elaine, 1, 3, 7, 26, 52, 119, 165 Hand of Ethelberta, The (Hardy) A Laodicean and, 123 class and, 156–57, 160–62 criticism of, 21, 153–54 Desperate Remedies and, 155, 158, 169 Far from the Madding Crowd and, 84, 165, 169
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femininity and, 161 gaze in, 165 gender and, 154, 162, 175, 177 identity and, 166–70 Jude the Obscure and, 157, 182 mimicry in, 156–58 as satire, 154–55 sensationalism and, 154–61 social class and, 153–56, 162, 166–69, 171–74 surveillance and, 165 Wessex novels and, 19 “Hap” (Hardy), 55 Hard Cash (Reade), 12 Hollington, Michael, 203–4 homosexuality, see same-sex attraction Howe, Irving, 59, 61–62, 77, 86–87, 123 human body A Laodicean and, 131–36, 138–45, 147 Far from the Madding Crowd and, 91, 102–3, 105, 107, 109–10, 113–16, 119 gaze and, 86, 91, 105 gender identity and, 41–43, 61, 157–59 Hand of Ethelberta and, 157–59 Jude the Obscure and, 201, 205–6 Mayor of Casterbridge and, 61, 69, 71, 73–74 sensationalism and, 14–15, 17 sexuality and, 31, 87, 89 Humble, Nicole, 157 imposture, 156–58, 172 see also mimicry identity A Laodicean and, 144–45 class and, 46, 94, 155–57, 173 Desperate Remedies and, 27–28 Far from the Madding Crowd and, 116 gender and, 61–62, 66–67, 116, 160, 199 Jude the Obscure and, 183–84, 189
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identity—continued Mayor of Casterbridge and, 69–72, 74 masculinity and, 38, 41–42, 51, 61, 69–72 moral occult and, 6, 79 sensation fiction and, 125 status and, 155–57, 159–60, 164, 166, 170 incest, 17, 28, 35–37, 46, 50 Ingham, Patricia, 40, 197, 201 injury, Owen Graye and, 38–40 Jentsch, Ernst, 74 Jerrold, Douglas, 53–54 Jones, Anna Maria, 125, 142, 177 Jude the Obscure (Hardy) Arabella Donn, 157, 186–94, 196, 202–3, 205, 207–8 bars in, 187–89 children’s deaths in, 204–6 critical response to, 179–80 defense of, 180–81 drunkenness in, 194–96 Ellis on, 181–82 Far from the Madding Crowd and, 86 gaze in, 189, 192 Hand of Ethelberta and, 157, 182 historical/social change in, 6 idealism in, 183–84 identity in, 184–85 Little Father Time, 181–82, 203–4, 207–8 Mayor of Casterbridge and, 49, 54, 80 neurotic figures in text, 204 pig-killing scene, 189–94 social criticism, 182–83 success of, 18 Sue, 196–208 value system in, 203–4 women in, 201–3 Kean, Charles, 15–16 Keep, Christopher, 132 Kramer, Dale, 54, 60, 66, 68, 73, 78, 183
Lady Audley’s Secret (Braddon), 10, 12, 43, 118 Larson, Jil, 147 Leskov, Nikolai, 6–7 Life and Work of Thomas Hardy, The (Davidson), 4 Linton, Eliza Lynn, 29 Lock, Charles, 1, 7 Loesberg, Jonathan, 46, 155, 157 Lougy, Robert E., 69 MacCarthy, Justin, 26 manors, 27, 43, 84, 167, 172 marriage A Laodicean and, 131, 135, 144, 147–48 Desperate Remedies and, 32, 38–39, 41, 45 Hand of Ethelberta and, 154–55, 159, 161, 166, 169–71, 174–77 Far from the Madding Crowd and, 89, 91, 97–98, 101, 105–7, 113, 118 Jude the Obscure and, 189, 193–94, 196–97, 200, 202, 207 Mayor of Casterbridge and, 63, 78 social status and, 154–55 women and, 32, 159 masculinity A Laodicean and, 124–26 class and, 51 Desperate Remedies and, 28–30, 32–36, 45–46 female identity and, 116, 124–26, 128–29 gaze and, 97–98 identity and, 32–36, 38–42, 104 Jude the Obscure and, 202 Mayor of Casterbridge and, 51–53, 61–75, 79 melodrama and, 106 social prerogative and, 91–92 surveillance and, 129–30 Victorian anxieties about, 28 Matz, Aaron, 182–83, 207
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Moses, Michael Valdez, 59–60 murder, 9, 17, 25, 41, 69, 89, 115, 117, 180–81, 205 naturalism, 4, 189 Neale, Catherine, 27, 30, 43 Newgate fiction, 8–9 Newton, K.M., 183, 189 Nikolopoulou, Anastasia, 6 No Name (Collins), 11 Novels of Character and Environment, 20–22 Novels of Ingenuity, 21–22, 123, 155 Ogden, Daryl, 97 Old St. Paul’s (Ainsworth), 8 Oliphant, Margaret, 179, 184 oral presentation, 6–7 orality, 3–9, 52 Osgood, McIlvaine, 18, 20, 153 Pair of Blue Eyes, A (Hardy), 21 Parnet, Claire, 144, 146, 175 pastoralism, 83–84, 86, 108, 119 patriarchy, 12, 33, 35, 38, 46, 65, 68, 87, 118, 125–26, 128, 131, 171 phrenology, 140 Poor Man and the Lady, The (Hardy), 25, 27 Problem Novels: Victorian Fiction Theorizes the Sensational Self (Jones), 125, 142 Pykett, Lyn, 12 Radford, Andrew, 154 Reade, Charles, 12–13, 63 realism A Laodicean and, 123, 125, 143 Far from the Madding Crowd and, 83–84 Hand of Ethelberta and, 165 Hardy and, 1–2, 4, 16–21 Henry James and, 6–7 Jude the Obscure and, 181, 192, 201, 203 Mayor of Casterbridge and, 52, 77
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Mayor of Casterbridge, The (Hardy) A Laodicean and, 124 Desperate Remedies and, 50–51 Donald Farfrae, 50–53, 55, 59–61, 64–72, 75–80 double in, 73–76 Far from the Madding Crowd and, 83–84 gender, 61–63 Henchard and masculinity in, 52–53, 64–72 Jude the Obscure and, 183–84, 195, 202 marriage in, 62–64 melodramatic mode in, 54–59 plot, 59–61 “politics of temperance” in, 53–54 psychological elements of, 73–77 same-sex attraction in, 50 self-discipline in, 64–65 sexual identity in, 65–67 significance to Hardy’s career, 49–50 suicide in, 76–77 theatricality, 51–52 tragedy and, 78–80 wrestling match, 69–71 McDowall, Arthur, 122–23, 143 McLaren, Angus, 101, 104 Meredith, George, 10, 25–27, 47 Mill on the Floss, The (Eliot), 54–55 Miller, J. Hillis, 13, 52 Millgate, Michael, 4, 8, 15, 18, 20, 28, 179 mimicry, 156 see also imposture Mistichelli, William, 102 Mitchell, Judith, 77, 201–2 moral occult defined, 5–6 Jude the Obscure and, 183, 189–90, 197–98, 200, 203–4, 207–8 Mayor of Casterbridge and, 56–57, 59, 79 Morgan, Rosemarie, 31–32, 87, 101, 109, 115
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realism—continued melodrama and, 1–2, 4, 26 sensation fiction and, 10–11, 13 see also antirealism Reynolds, Kimberley, 157 Rime of the Ancient Mariner, The (Coleridge), 5 Rimmer, Mary, 8 Roberts, Patrick, 35–36 Romanticism, 4, 14 Rosenman, Ellen Bayuk, 112 Sala, George Augustus, 17, 51 same-sex attraction, 28, 32, 35, 50, 124 Sasaki, Toru, 21 satire, 99, 114, 153–55, 158–62, 165–66, 169, 171, 176, 178, 183 Schwarz, Daniel R., 203 Schweik, Robert, 154, 162 secrecy A Laodicean and, 124, 127, 129, 138, 142–46 blushing and, 142–46 class and, 155–60, 170–76 desire and, 124 Desperate Remedies and, 37–38 Far from the Madding Crowd and, 89, 118 Hand of Ethelberta and, 155–56, 158–60, 163, 170–76 Mayor of Casterbridge and, 57–58, 67 melodrama and, 13–14 sensation fiction and, 155–56 self defeat, 99, 105 self-determination, 126, 135, 196 self-discipline, 51–53, 59, 64 self-dramatization, 110, 113 sensation fiction A Laodicean and, 123, 125–26, 130 bigamy and, 43 class and, 84–85 courtship novel and, 176–77 debate over, 10–15, 18 Desperate Remedies and, 25, 28, 31, 37, 45–46
Far from the Madding Crowd, 88–89, 93, 119 gaze and, 14 generic possibilities of, 10–13 Hand of Ethelberta and, 154–56, 161 Hardy and, 2–3, 21 Jones on, 125–26, 142, 176–77 Jude the Obscure and, 179–81, 189, 206 manor houses in, 172 Mayor of Casterbridge and, 57, 78–79 narrative closure in, 114 reaction to, 10–12 realist novel and, 10 social critique and, 84–85, 109–10 surveillance and, 125–26 villains and, 45 Shakespeare, William, 8, 15–17, 49, 51, 60, 137 Shires, Linda, 21, 83, 93, 110, 118 Showalter, Elaine, 62–63, 66, 70 Shuttleworth, Sally, 203–4 social class Desperate Remedies and, 27–28, 30, 34, 42, 46–47 Far from the Madding Crowd and, 84–85, 87, 95–97, 104, 110 Hand of Ethelberta and, 153–56, 162, 166–69, 171–74 Hardy and, 13, 15–16 Jude the Obscure and, 182–85, 188, 191–93, 195, 198–99, 203 Mayor of Casterbridge and, 51, 53, 56, 72, 74–75 melodrama and, 2–4, 7–8 spectacle Far from the Madding Crowd and, 103–9, 113–15, 117 Hand of Ethelberta and, 163–67, 170 Jude the Obscure and, 188–89, 194, 205–6 melodrama and, 15–17, 93, 130, 134–38 sensationalism and, 85–86 sexuality and, 188–89
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tattoos, 144–46 Taylor, Dennis, 206 Taylor, Richard H., 27, 123, 154, 165 Tess of the d’Urbervilles (Hardy), 11, 20, 22, 45, 49, 80, 86, 99, 110, 187 “third class” of Hardy’s fiction, 21 Thomas Hardy: Distance and Desire (Miller), 13
Thomas, Jane, 46, 127 Tillotson, Kathleen, 13 Trollope, Anthony, 10 Trumpet-Major, The (Hardy), 21 Turner, Paul, 31–32 Two on a Tower (Hardy), 21 Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Stowe), 17 Under the Greenwood Tree (Hardy), 6, 20 villains, 9, 27–28, 38, 42–43, 45, 50, 56–57, 99, 101, 103, 124, 129, 147, 155, 169, 171, 174, 183, 201–2 Vint, Sherryl, 191 voyeurism, 13, 45, 85, 88, 91, 124, 126, 128, 130–31, 138 Walkowitz, Judith, 157, 170 Weber, Carl J., 8 Well-Beloved, The (Hardy), 21 Wessex Novels, 9, 18–21 Wessex Poems (Hardy), 19 Wessex Tales (Hardy), 49 Widdowson, Peter, 21–22, 154, 158, 164, 169 Windsor Castle (Ainsworth), 9 Wing, George, 154 Woman in White, The (Collins), 10, 12, 118 Wood, Ellen, 10–11, 13, 160 Wotten, George, 85 Yeazell, Ruth Bernard, 139
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society and, 118–19 surveillance and, 125–26 spying, 13, 85, 87, 90, 124–27 see also surveillance “Storyteller: Reflections on the Works of Nikolai Leskov” (Benjamin), 6–7 suicide A Laodicean and, 136 Desperate Remedies and, 45 Far from the Madding Crowd and, 115 Jude the Obscure and, 180–81, 195, 204–5, 207 Mayor of Casterbridge and, 50, 57, 73, 76–77 sensation fiction and, 17 surveillance A Laodicean and, 124–26, 128–29, 133–35, 138, 143, 146 Far from the Madding Crowd and, 85, 88–90, 93, 97, 107–8, 117–19 Hand of Ethelberta and, 165 Hardy’s writing style and, 13–14 Jude the Obscure and, 206 see also spying
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