Thomas Hardy, Mona Caird and John

‘FALLING OVER THE SAME PRECIPICE’: it was first published in serial form in Tinsley’s Magazine , The Wing of 5 THOMAS HARDY, MONA CAIRD AND Azrael has only recently been reprinted. The Wing of Azrael deserves to be read in its own right, but it is also JOHN STUART MILL rewarding to read it alongside A Pair of Blue Eyes . Such a comparative reading reveals not only how Caird’s novel is in dialogue with Hardy’s, but also the differences and correspondences in the ways each novelist DEMELZA HOOKWAY engages with the philosophy of John Stuart Mill. This essay will consider how Hardy and Caird evoke, explore and re-work, through their cliff- edge narratives, Millian ideas about how individuals can challenge On July 3 1889, Hardy, by his own arrangement, sat next to Mona Caird customs: the qualities they must have, the strategies they must deploy, at the dinner for the Incorporated Society of Authors. 1 Perhaps one of and the difficulties they must negotiate, in order to carry out experiments their topics of conversation was the reaction to Caird’s recently published in living. Like Hardy, Caird regarded Mill as her intellectual hero. When novel The Wing of Azrael . Like Hardy’s A Pair of Blue Eyes in 1873, The asked by the Women’s Penny Paper in 1890 if she was influenced by any Wing of Azrael features a literal cliffhanger which is a formative event women in forming her views on gender equality she replied ‘“No, not in the life of its heroine. This similarity suggests that Caird, a journalist particularly. I knew so few whose intellect I respected. My views were and novelist who was born in 1854 and died in 1932, may have been pronounced at an early age. John Stuart Mills [sic], I think, was the first to 6 influenced by Hardy’s novel when writing her own. Reviewers of The help me to bring these thoughts and feelings into form by his writings”.’ Wing of Azrael in the months preceding the dinner were not struck by Caird’s critique of marriage in the Westminster Review followed Mill’s any resemblances to A Pair of Blue Eyes , however. They mainly debated The Subjection of Women (1869) in insisting that under the current social whether The Wing of Azrael had artistic value, or whether it was purely arrangements nothing could actually be known about women’s nature or a didactic work. Caird’s three-volume novel had been published in the its potential for development. As part of her commitment to individualism, wake of the controversy caused by her article on ‘Marriage’ for the Caird engages with Millian ideas of free discussion throughout her fiction 7 Westminster Review in the summer of 1888 . In the article, for which to offer an ideal of ‘creative, liberating’ conversation. Hardy’s use of Caird remains most well-known, she declared that ‘the present form of Mill in his fiction is not as obviously pervasive as it in Mona Caird’s, but marriage – exactly in proportion to its conformity with orthodox ideas Millian themes and echoes of his language occur throughout the novels. – is a vexatious failure’. 2 She used an historical analysis to demonstrate In On Liberty , published in 1859, Mill called for greater diversity in that ideas about marriage which were supposedly firmly established had society, for ‘new and original experiments in living’. 8 In his copy of On in fact been constantly changing. The Wing of Azrael fleshes out and Liberty, Hardy underlined the phrase ‘experiments in living’ and most dramatises many of the concerns she raised in ‘Marriage’ about women’s famously used the words in Jude the Obscure (1895) when Jude laments ‘moral starvation’ (p.194). As a consequence, in the preface to her novel, to Sue ‘Perhaps the world is not illuminated enough for such experiments she is anxious to deny that her fictional characters are representatives of as ours!’ 9 Mill anticipated that those who were opposed to experiments social questions and principles. Even those reviewers who insisted that in living would argue that: The Wing of Azrael was a polemical piece acknowledged its other merits. There must be some length of time and amount of experience, after ‘It is avowedly a story with a purpose,’ declared The Academy , ‘Yet there which a moral or prudential truth may be regarded as established: is abundance of cleverness in it.’ 3 The reviewer in the Young Folks Paper and it is merely desired to prevent generation after generation was far more laudatory of Caird’s skills: ‘She has wit, humour, dramatic from falling over the same precipice which has been fatal to their intensity, and tragic force, and with these qualities so highly developed predecessors. (p.89-90) as they are with her, she may achieve a wide and enduring fame’. 4 Nevertheless, whilst Hardy’s novel has been continuously in print since 132 133 In On Liberty, the precipice represents the danger that society perceives jumping over the precipice. Mill’s precipice metaphor resonates through in improper or unconventional behaviour. The possibility of falling over A Pair of Blue Eyes and the image is reprised and extended in The Wing the precipice to one’s death is a threat used as a means of control: to of Azrael . reinforce customs and to discourage people from taking risks in the way The cliffhangers in both novels create suspense and drama, but they they live their lives. This threat forms part of also have something to say about how social structures impinge on or the tendency of society to impose, by other means than civil penalties, enable individuality. If the cliffs can be threatening and dangerous, they its own ideas and practices as rules of conduct on those who dissent can also offer the chance for spontaneous action to be taken and liberty from them; to fetter the development, and, if possible, prevent the claimed. On the cliff side humans are made aware of their smallness, formation, of any individuality not in harmony with its ways, and vulnerability and mortality, and this can act as a levelling factor. Though compel all characters to fashion themselves upon the model of its an individual might feel dwarfed by the landscape, they are far from ‘lost own. (p.9) in the crowd’ – in that famous phrase of Mill’s from On Liberty (p.73). Rather, they are called upon to confront their own sense of selfhood. This exact formulation is found in The Return of the Native (1878) when Removed from domesticity and community, the cliffs can be a space Mrs Yeobright warns Eustacia: ‘You, Eustacia, stand on the edge of a conducive to philosophical reflection, a place where it is possible to put precipice without knowing it. Only show my son one half the temper problems into perspective or gain an insight into how difficulties can be you have shown to me to-day – and you may before long – and you will resolved. The danger, excitement, and energy generated by proximity to find that though he is gentle as a child with you now he can be as hard a sheer drop or to the tumult of the sea can be harnessed to add vigour as steel.’ 10 Eustacia’s ‘reckless unconventionality’, her ‘forwardness of and conviction to newly-formed opinions. In the preface to A Pair of mind’ and her ‘instincts towards social non-conformity’ position her Blue Eyes Hardy describes the Cornish coast as ‘the region of dream on the edge of a precipice in the eyes of the traditional Mrs Yeobright, and mystery’ (p.3). Caird’s Scottish coastline is similarly imbued with who is consumed by thoughts of how actions will be interpreted by local spiritual significance – and importantly for her tragic novel – a sense of gossip. 11 The effectiveness of the precipice threat perhaps lies in the hope. Her heroine Viola loves ‘the wonderful sea that spoke and sang all sense of inescapability and inevitability it conveys: if individuals are too the year long … eternally speaking and prophesying and lamenting’ 14 unorthodox – that is, if they get too close to the edge of the cliff – then bringing to mind another comment in Hardy’s preface about ‘the eternal the effects will be catastrophic, there will be no turning back. The threat soliloquy of the waters’ (p.3). Her name evokes the ship-wrecked Viola in of danger is coupled with the lure of safety offered by ground which Twelfth Night , and this association with the sea is perhaps also intended is firm and well-tested. Uncustomary behaviour brings with it unknown as a more hopeful counterpoint to the story of Azrael, the Angel of Death, consequences, often imagined as a leap into the abyss; when Elfride and which gives the novel its title. Azrael, Caird explains in an introduction, Stephen in A Pair of Blue Eyes contemplate their elopement, they do so inhabits the desert. Whether in the Cornwall of Hardy’s novel or the ‘in spite of its daring, its fathomless results’. 12 Orthodoxy and custom, Scotland of Caird’s, the extremity and potential instability of the cliffs on the other hand, are conceptualised in terms of stability, solid ground, make them an effective site for opposing established customs, but also firmly established foundations and deeply-rooted ideas. Hardy’s editor for exposing the difficulties of deviating from the accepted path. Leslie Stephen used just such language to question the advisability of diversity and experimentation in ‘Social Macadamisation’, a response Rosemarie Morgan has argued that in A Pair of Blue Eyes Hardy to On Liberty published in Fraser’s Magazine in 1872.

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