NEGOTIATING THE GOTHIC IN THE FICTION OF THOMAS HARDY BY NAJWA YOUSIF EL INGLIZI A THESIS SUBMITTED TO THE UNIVERSITY OF BIRMINGHAM FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY 2002 University of Birmingham Research Archive e-theses repository This unpublished thesis/dissertation is copyright of the author and/or third parties. The intellectual property rights of the author or third parties in respect of this work are as defined by The Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988 or as modified by any successor legislation. Any use made of information contained in this thesis/dissertation must be in accordance with that legislation and must be properly acknowledged. Further distribution or reproduction in any format is prohibited without the permission of the copyright holder. Abstract The purpose of this research is to investigate Thomas Hardy’s relation to the Gothic tradition, especially that deriving from the classic period 1760-mid-1820s. The main novels chosen for such an investigation are Two on a Tower, The Mayor of Casterbridge, Tess of the d’Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure. Parallels with the following texts form the heart of the thesis: Horace Walpole, The Castle of Otranto, Ann Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho, William Godwin, Caleb Williams, Matthew Lewis, The Monk, Mary Shelley, Frankenstein and Charles Maturin, Melmoth the Wanderer. This investigation has been instigated by three major elements noted in the criticism on Hardy’s literary art in general and on his tragedies in particular. First, although Hardy scholars employ terminology pertaining to the Gothic and romance genres in describing Hardy’s plots, characters and settings, very few of them make a direct and explicit connection to the Gothic novel. Second, the few who do broach the Gothic elements in Hardy’s fiction limit their understanding of the kind of Gothic Hardy employs mainly to the second quarter of the nineteenth century and onwards. Moreover, they seem to be more willing to admit such influence in his minor works, obfuscating the influence of Gothic discourse on his major novels. Therefore, this research will attempt to investigate Hardy’s involvement with Gothic discourse and examine the ways in which the characteristic settings, drama and character-types of such discourse are domesticated, complicated and made more subtle in Hardy’s work. Finally, it envisages further investigation into Hardy’s work in its relation to his architectural knowledge and his philosophic views of life in general, and his views of humanity’s place in it in particular. In Memory of My Beloved Father And To My Most Cherished Mother Acknowledgements “The difficult we do at once; the impossible takes a little longer” It has taken me almost a lifetime to make it to this most challenging point. What has given me the strength is mainly the desire to fulfil a “monstrous” dream, which has been kept alive by a promise I had made to the youth I taught and watched grow into adulthood only for their young lives to be snuffed out too soon, too cruelly. Unlike the unfortunate Jude, many precious people have supported and encouraged me. The first of these is my dear beloved uncle, Rev. Dr. Salim Sahyouni, whose support opened the door of opportunity for me. I would also like to express special thanks to The World Council of Churches for their financial support and Auntie Alice G. Haggar for her infinite love and generosity. My undying gratitude goes to Dr. May Maalouf-Alfy, my MA supervisor, whose confidence in me has been my beacon. I will remain forever indebted to Dr. Richard Cauldwell for his support and faith in me against all odds and to Mrs. Karen Jackson for her greatly appreciated assistance and kindness. Also, I wish to express my love and gratitude to my uncle Fouad and family whose infinite love, generosity and support has provided me with the shady oasis in these years of hardships, loneliness and constant challenge. I reserve my greatest love and indebtedness for my mother for her heroic forbearance, and all my family members for their love and prayers. My unreserved thanks are extended to all my dear friends who have stood by me. Finally, my immeasurable gratitude, appreciation and indebtedness are reserved for the two without whom this thesis would not have been realised: my supervisor, Prof. Steve Ellis, for his exemplary dedication, invaluable guidance and meticulousness, infinite patience and, most of all, for his accepting the challenge of supervising me and for providing me with the sustaining power to go on, and God for keeping His promise to hold on to me even when I let go. Contents Introduction 1 Chapter 1 The Gothic Arena 7 Chapter 2 Critical Approaches to the Gothic in Hardy’s Fiction: Derision, Evasion, Reservation 58 Chapter 3 Two on a Tower: The Gothic Web 89 Chapter 4 The Mayor of Casterbridge: The Gothic Trinity 114 Chapter 5 Tess of the d’Urbervilles: The Gothic Sacrifice 153 Chapter 6 Jude the Obscure: The Gothic Monster 190 Conclusion 232 Bibliography 235 Introduction On reading your notice of A Group of Noble Dames, I confess to a feeling of surprise that the critic of a paper which I had imagined to possess a certain virility should be shocked at the mere tale of a mutilated piece of marble, seeing what we have had of late years in mutilations and bloody bones, both fictitious and real. [. .] But supposing ‘Barbara of the House of Grebe’ to be indeed a grisly narrative. A good horror has its place in art. Shall we, for instance, condemn ‘Alonzo the Brave’? For my part I would not give up a single worm of his skull.1 This research has been instigated by the many signals in Hardy’s life and work of his recourse to the Gothic tradition in a more extensive way than any of the very few Hardy critics who discuss this issue seem willing to admit. Their obfuscation of Hardy’s debt to the Gothic and their incomplete handling of this issue warrant special attention, which will be given in chapter 2. After this, my main intention is to demonstrate Hardy’s indebtedness to this tradition through a detailed reading of one of his minor novels, Two on a Tower, and his major fiction, specifically The Mayor of Casterbridge, Tess of the d’Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure, where I am particularly interested in his use of the conventions of the literary Gothic of the period 1760-mid-1820s, a period representing the classic corpus of Gothic fiction. Though the importance of the architectural Gothic to Hardy as a professional architect and an artist is touched upon, this is a subject which would require a thesis in itself, and here I restrict myself to literary issues. Interrelating Hardy to the Gothic is an intricate business, for, as I shall attempt to demonstrate in chapter 1, “Gothic” is an extremely complex and contentious term, which has been applied to aesthetic, political, literary and architectural concepts and movements from the mid-eighteenth century onwards. I shall attempt to provide an overview of the complexity of the field, highlighting the literary genre’s pervasive influence into modern times and emphasising certain properties and conventions of the Gothic, which I believe are important in my study of Hardy’s affinities with it. The chapter concludes with a kind of referential definition as a focal point for my approach. In chapter 2, as I have 1 Thomas Hardy, “The Merry Wives of Wessex,” Thomas Hardy’s Public Voice: The Essays, Speeches, and Miscellaneous Prose, ed. Michael Millgate (Oxford: Clarendon, 2001) 111. 1 stated above, I shall offer an assessment of the works of the most relevant critics of Hardy who have hinted at, discussed or referred to such affinities. Such a review will demonstrate the evasive, derisive and fragmentary critical handling of the subject in general and the obfuscation of Hardy’s relation to the classic Gothic in particular. It will also demonstrate that this critical concept of Gothic is limited mainly to the popular, sensational and melodramatic fiction of the second quarter of the nineteenth-century. In the light of these two chapters, I then offer in chapter 3 a close and detailed reading of Two on a Tower, which, though seen as a “minor” novel, has been chosen as a forerunner of his major fiction, anticipating by three years and a half, as Millgate points out, Hardy’s writing of The Mayor of Casterbridge.2 Through such an analysis, I aim to demonstrate how extensive Hardy’s assimilation of the Gothic is through the components of diction, setting, character portrayal and thematic concerns. Millgate claims that this interlude between Two on a Tower and The Mayor “provided Hardy with an opportunity virtually to reconstruct himself as a novelist upon a new basis,” leaving “[t]he semi- romances of the early 1880s [. .] sternly behind” (222). Through a similarly detailed analysis of The Mayor of Casterbridge, I shall attempt to demonstrate that, contrary to Millgate’s claims, Hardy engages in a more sophisticated dialectic with the Gothic, which however is a natural development from works like Two on a Tower. I shall unearth Hardy’s use of Gothic features such as doubles, spectres and ghosts, and his manipulation of highly charged religious and social themes of persecution in relation to the Gothic of William Godwin and Matthew Lewis in particular. Because I believe Hardy’s involvement with the Gothic becomes more extensive and expert in his later novels, I shall offer a reading of Tess of the d’Urbervilles in juxtaposition with a series of classic Gothic novels, particularly those of Ann Radcliffe, Lewis and Charles Maturin.