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Thomas Hardy's Brains THEORY AND INTERPRETATION OF NARRATIVE James Phelan, Peter J. Rabinowitz, and Robyn Warhol, Series Editors Thomas Hardy’s Brains PSYCHOLOGY, NEUROLOGY, AND Hardy’S IMAGINATION Suzanne Keen THE OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS | COLUMBUS Copyright © 2014 by The Ohio State University. All rights reserved. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Number 2013032860 ISBN-13: 978-0-8142-1249-3 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0-8142-1249-2 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN-13: 978-0-8142-9352-2 (cd-rom) ISBN-10: 0-8142-9352-2 (cd-rom) Cover design by Laurence J. Nozik Type set in Adobe Sabon Typsetting by Juliet Williams Printed by Thomson-Shore, Inc. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Mate- rials. ANSI Z39.48–1992. 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 to The Thomas Hardy Association CONTENTS Acknowledgments ix Abbreviations for Hardy’s Works xi A Note about Editions xiii INTRODUCTION Psychological Hardy 1 CHAPTER 1 Psychological Influences on Hardy 17 CHAPTER 2 The Minds of Hardy’s Characters 53 CHAPTER 3 Emotion and Cognition in Hardy’s Verse 99 CHAPTER 4 The Neurological Turn 130 CHAPTER 5 Empathetic Hardy 170 Works Cited 211 Index 228 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS My Hardy debts run deep. I began reading him as a teenager, when my mother, Sally Whitcomb Keen, put The Return of the Native in my hands. I had already visited Hardy country, though to a ten year old in 1972 the barrows and downs spoke of Tolkien and Rosemary Sutcliff, and I couldn’t yet know how much Hardy those writers had absorbed. Hardy country was also Whitcomb country, where the ancestral barn and deconsecrated parish church still stand. My Whitcombs (the Robert line) left Dorset in the seventeenth century, long before William Barnes and Thomas Hardy made their neighborhood a part of Wessex. Many years later, James and Helen Gibson dropped me off at the village of Whitcomb during the biennial Hardy Conference. I was five months’ pregnant, and they didn’t think I should walk. Though I had not yet published a word about Hardy, the scholars and readers at the Hardy Conference welcomed me into their community. The Thomas Hardy Association opened in cyberspace in 1996, and has proven an important forum and resource for Hardyans worldwide. I am grateful for the suggestions and encouragement of Ian Duncan, Susan Stanford Friedman, Richard Fulton, Patrick Leary, Phillip Mallet, Rosemarie Morgan, Alan Palmer, Claude Rawson, Kristin Ross, the late Bob Schweick, Linda Shires, Meir Sternberg, Lisa Zunshine, and several anonymous press readers. Editorial assistant Chelsi Hewitt gave the man- uscript a lick, spit, and polish. A Lenfest Summer Research Grant from ix x • Acknowledgments Washington and Lee University enabled me to visit Widener Library at Harvard University to consult its superb collection of nineteenth-century periodicals. A Hewlett-Mellon Grant from Washington and Lee Univer- sity supported a year’s sabbatical for writing, for which I owe thanks to Provost June Aprille and Dean of the College Hank Dobin, members of the President’s Advisory Committee, and the most munificent of donors, Gerry and Marguerite Lenfest. Earlier versions of chapter 5, and small parts of other chapters appeared previously in BRANCH: Britain, Representation and Nineteenth- Century History, ed. Dino Franco Felluga, “‘Altruism’ Makes a Space for Empathy, 1852” (July 2012); in Poetics Today, ed. Meir Sternberg, “Empathetic Hardy: Bounded, Ambassadorial, and Broadcast Strategies of Narrative Empathy” 32.2 (Summer 2011), 349–89; in Style, ed. John V. Knapp, “Response to Alan Palmer,” 45.2 (Summer 2011), 357–59; and in The Ashgate Research Companion to Thomas Hardy, ed. Rosemarie Morgan, “Psychological Approaches to Thomas Hardy,” (Ashgate, 2010), 285–300. I am grateful to the editors for their permission to reproduce portions or revised versions of those essays here. ABBREVIATIONS FOR Hardy’S WORKS Desperate Remedies (1871) DR Under the Greenwood Tree (1872) UGT A Pair of Blue Eyes (1873) PBE Far from the Madding Crowd (1874) FFMC The Hand of Ethelberta (1876) HE The Return of the Native (1878) RN The Trumpet Major (1880) TM A Laodicean (1881) L Two on a Tower (1882) TT The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886) MC The Woodlanders (1887) W Wessex Tales (1888) WT A Group of Noble Dames (1891) GND Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891) Tess Life’s Little Ironies (1894) LLI Jude the Obscure (1895) Jude The Well-Beloved (1897) W-B Wessex Poems (1898) WP xi xii • Abbreviations for Hardy’s Works Poems of the Past and Present (1901[2]) PPP The Dynasts (1904, 1906, 1908) Dynasts Time’s Laughingstocks (1909) TL A Changed Man (1913) CM Satires of Circumstance (1914) SC Moments of Vision (1917) MV Late Lyrics (1922) LL Human Shows (1925) HS Winter Words (1928) WW The Collected Letters of Thomas Hardy Letters (ed. Millgate and Purdy) The Early Life of Thomas Hardy, 1840–1891 Early Life (F. E. Hardy) The Later Years of Thomas Hardy, 1892–1928 Later Years (F. E. Hardy) The Life and Work of Thomas Hardy Life and Work (ed. Millgate) The Literary Notebooks of Thomas Hardy Literary Notebooks (ed. Björk) The Personal Notebooks of Thomas Hardy Personal Notebooks (ed. Taylor) Thomas Hardy’s “Facts” Notebook “Facts” Notebook (ed. Greenslade) Thomas Hardy’s “Poetical Matter” Notebook “Poetical” Notebook (ed. Dalziel and Millgate) A NOTE ABOUT EDITIONS In parenthetical page number citations, I refer whenever possible to the Oxford World Classics paperbacks of Hardy’s fiction, a set of critical edi- tions published under the general editorship of Simon Gatrell, reissued in 2009 with identical pagination. When not available, as in The Hand of Ethelberta, I fall back on New Wessex Editions. In several cases compari- son with the Penguin editions, which print the first edition or manuscript version of Hardy’s works, requires citation of an alternative text. Notes indicate this deviation from my usual practice. For the poetry, I rely on Samuel Hynes, ed., The Complete Poetical Works of Thomas Hardy, v. 1–5 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982–95), indicated by volume number and original edition title abbreviation, e.g., for a poem originally pub- lished in Wessex Poems, (WP, v. 1, 81–2). Part and line numbers in cita- tions from The Dynasts refer to volumes 4 and 5 of Hynes’s edition. For Hardy’s life as he recorded it, I rely on the standard edition, The Life and Work of Thomas Hardy, edited by Michael Millgate, based on “materials previously drawn upon for The Early Life of Thomas Hardy, 1840–1891, and The Later Years of Thomas Hardy, 1892–1928, published over the name of Florence Emily Hardy.” Throughout I have relied upon two elec- tronic concordances, Martin Ray’s CD-ROM A Variorum Concordance to the “Complete Poems” (1999) and Mitsuharu Matsuoka’s web-based The Victorian Literary Studies Archive Hyper-Concordance. xiii “He considered that he knew fairly well . the life of an isolated student cast upon the billows of London with no protection but his brains.” —Hardy recalling his younger self, c. 1867 (Life and Work 58) “Dr. Grosart finds abundant evidence that the facts and mysteries of nature and human nature have come urgently before Mr. Hardy’s penetrative brain.” —quoted by Hardy, February 1888 (Life and Work 213–14) “His back, his legs, his hands, his face, were longing to be out of the world. His brain was not longing to be, because, like the brain of most people, it was the last part of his body to realise a situation.” —Thomas Hardy, March 1890 (Life and Work 224) INTRODUCTION Psychological Hardy “He was lying on his back in the sun, thinking how useless he was, and covered his face with his straw hat. The sun’s rays streamed through the interstices of the straw, the lining having disappeared. Reflecting on his experiences of the world so far as he had got he came to the con- clusion that he did not wish to grow up”: psychological Hardy began as dissociated Hardy (Life and Work 20). Later he would give this experi- ence of daydream and alienation to his character Jude Fawley (Jude 12). Entranced by the intensification of the color when evening sun hit the Venetian red walls at Bockhampton (Life and Work 20), dancing to conceal his weeping at the sound of certain airs (19), aesthetic Hardy responded to sensations feelingly. Developmentally delayed Hardy, though a precocious reader (19), remarked in old age that “a clue to much of his character and action throughout his life is afforded by his lateness of development in virility . a child till he was sixteen, a youth till he was five-and-twenty, and a young man until he was nearly fifty” (37). Young adult Hardy, while busy becoming the writer Thomas Hardy, was also a traumatized Hardy, who lost his close friend and mentor Horace Moule to suicide in 1873 (Millgate, Biography Revisited 141–44), and a repressed Hardy, who granted liberties to his fictional characters that he never allowed himself. Lacking the Freudian terminology did not prevent Hardy from rec- ognizing his repressive habits. He wrote of himself, “I have a faculty 1 2 • Introduction (possibly not uncommon) for burying an emotion in my heart or brain for forty years, and exhuming it at the end of that time as fresh as when interred” (Life and Work 408). The love in the elegiac “Emma” poems may have been exhumed in just this fashion even as he consigned his dead wife to the clay (SC v. 2, 47–70). Puzzling over his own disposition, the poet Hardy lets his reader see a telepathic Hardy, drafting a poem about his cousin, unaware she is dying (WP v.
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