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Reappraisal of Thomas Hardy's Earlier Novels

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Reappraisal of Thomas Hardy's Earlier Novels Sendai Shirayuri Women's College Reappraisal of Thomas Hardy’s Earlier Novels YOSHINO Satoko Introduction Thomas Hardy’s novels have inspired a massive body of criticism and analysis, but almost all of which has been devoted to his ‘major novels’, such as The Return of the Native, The Mayor of Casterbridge, Tess of the d’Urbervilles, Jude the Obscure and so on. Among his fourteen novels Hardy’s earlier works, especially his first novel Desperate Remedies and the third one, A Pair of Blue Eyes have been consistently undervalued and neglected. Only Under the Greenwood Tree, the second published work has an established value as a ‘pastoral romance’, but it still is ‘very slight and rather unexciting’.1 Each work has merits and defects. Yet a reading of these works as a whole can reveal the unity and consistency of Hardy’s art and his fictional world. They should deserve a fuller and more sympathetic reading than they have conventionally been accorded. So this study pro- poses a reappraisal of these Hardy’s earlier and ‘lesser’ novels, Desperate Remedies, Under the Greenwood Tree and A Pair of Blue Eyes, and it also does aim to be a contribution towards their reevaluation. If we can discover and enjoy the individual delights which they have to offer, this paper will have served its purpose. Desperate Remedies is Hardy’s first published novel. He completed this work in the spring of 1870, and it was sent to Macmillan and Co. which was the most distinguished and successful publishing house of the time. This story includes impersonation, illegitimacy and murder, and is concerned with barriers of social class. Macmillan rejected the novel as being too sensa- tional and sexually charged. During the autumn Hardy’s fiancée, Emma Gifford copied out the revised manuscript and Hardy sent it to the less-reputable house of William Tinsley. Tinsley offered to publish the book but was disinclined to accept the financial loss that would probably result. Hardy was therefore required to invest seventy-five pounds in the venture. Fear of harmful repercussions in the architectural profession if his other interest became known had led him to publish anonymously, so his name remained as ‘obscure’ as before. On 25 March 1871 Desperate Remedies was eventually published, so it set Hardy’s course and inaugurated his literary career which was to last for another fifty-seven years. Hardy’s next novel, Under the Greenwood Tree was his response to the positive critical reception of the rustic characters in Desperate Remedies. Although it was offered to Alexander Macmillan on August 1871, he thought the public would find the tale very slight and rather 47 NII-Electronic Library Service Sendai Shirayuri Women's College YOSHINO Satoko unexciting ; he expressed a readiness to reconsider the book six months later, but Hardy took his general response to be a rejection and as this was the third manuscript to be returned by Macmillan’s he decided to trouble them no further. Instead he sent it to Tinsley Brothers and they published it anonymously in two volumes in June 1872. Among the favorable reviews were Hardy’s friend Horace Moule’s praise in the Saturday Review, and the endorsement of Hardy’s new vein in the Athenaeum. The favorable reception accorded to Under the Greenwood Tree must have strengthened Hardy’s belief in his ability to transfer his efforts successfully from architecture to novel writing. In the summer of 1871 Hardy was already sketching in outline his fourth novel, under the provisional title of ‘A Winning Tongue Had He’. Of three novels he had written, one had been abandoned on the advice of publishers and readers, another had been published in March of the same year, and a third was now being considered by Alexander Macmillan. The pressures of getting published inevitably influenced the young author’s artistic decisions, and Hardy’s uncer- tainty of direction is shown in the diverse qualities of his early novels. The unpublished ‘The Poor Man and the Lady’ had been a social satire thought to have missed its mark ; Desperate Remedies was a sensation novel ; and in Under the Greenwood Tree Hardy had changed direction again and written a pastoral romance. He was feeling his way to a method, as he put it and A Pair of Blue Eyes, as the new novel was at last entitled, proved to be more than another inter- esting change. This time the influence of the three earlier works could be seen as Hardy tried to co-ordinate his best effects. It is a bridge between Hardy’s period of initial experimentation and what is generally seen as his mature work. The serial version appeared in Tinsleys’ Maga- zine from September 1872 to July 1873 ; the novel was published, with Hardy’s name on the title-page for the first time, under the same title of A Pair of Blue Eyes, in May 1873. I. Desperate Remedies George Meredith’s advice, on reading Hardy’s first attempt at fiction ‘The Poor Man and the Lady’, that Hardy should concentrate on producing a stronger plot produced his first pub- lished novel, Desperate Remedies. Its heroine Cytherea Graye, left impecunious by her father’s sudden accidental death, is taken up by Miss Aldclyffe, an older wealthy woman and a former beauty, who coerces her into marriage with her steward, Aeneas Manston, a man who fascinates her, but whom she finds sin- ister. Her instinctual fears prove well founded when it is revealed not only that Manston is Miss Aldclyffe’s illegitimate son, but that he murdered his first wife. This offers Cytherea an escape, and marriage to her earlier suitor, Edward Springrove, an architect. On Miss Aldclyffe’s death, as Manston’s widow, Cytherea inherits her estate and lives with her husband Edward in Aldclyffe’s Knapwater House. It has a lively assortment of ingredients : it includes a murder, a dramatic fire, ghostly 48 NII-Electronic Library Service Sendai Shirayuri Women's College Reappraisal of Thomas Hardy’s Earlier Novels apparitions, wailings in the night, a suicide, a mysterious disease, false and confused identities, a fight, philosophical reflections, extensive literary allusions, a Byronic and Mephistophelian villain, a love story, farce and a Lesbian incident…. The tone varies from comedy to tragedy, from the light to the gruesome, from fixation upon things ephemeral to the intimation of things eternal and universal ; it is a remarkable range. Hardy also adheres to a minute chronological verisimilitude. Individual sections describes periods of widely varying duration, ‘ranging from eighteen years to half an hour.’2 But of course the total fusion of these disparate elements if scarcely possible and Hardy’s handling of his material is sometimes tentative. Although skillfully constructed, Desperate Remedies, written at the end of a decade that saw the rising popularity of sensation fiction in the novels of Wilkie Collins is over burdened by its plot ; Hardy placed it among his ‘Novels of Ingenuity’.3 Hardy admired Collins’ art in con- structing novels of complicated pattern ; he had read him, particularly with an eye to structural ingenuity and the creation of suspense, during his early apprenticeship, after George Meredith, reader for Chapman and Hall, had recommended him to rewrite ‘The Poor Man and the Lady’, or put it aside and attempt a different kind of novel, devoid of satire and with a more compli- cated plot. Adopting the latter course, Hardy wrote this novel.4 Desperate Remedies is much more than a sensational story. It draws not only on the genre of the sensation novel, but also on those of Gothic romance and the detective story. Again, there are a murder, a suicide, a fire, a ruin, and impersonations, plotting and counterplotting. There are striking scenes such as a powerful waterfall and the pumping engine. And an unearthly storm that accompanies Manston’s playing of the organ : ‘One is the waterfall, which stands so close by that you can hear that there waterfall in every room of the house, night or day, ill or well.’…‘The pumping-engine. That’s close by the Old House, and sends water up the hill and all over the Great House.’ From the same direction down the dell they could now hear the whistling creak of cranks, repeated at intervals of half-a-minute, with a sousing noise between each : a creak, a souse, then another creak, and so on continually. (66) He now played more powerfully. Cytherea had never heard music in the completeness of full orchestral power, and the tones of the organ, which reverberated with considerable effect in the comparatively small space of the room, heightened by the elemental strife of light and sound outside, moved her to a degree out of proportion of the actual power of the mere notes, practised as was the hand that produced them. (155) The influence of contemporary stage melodrama is evident in the stereotyped figures of the innocent female victim and her villainous sexual oppressor. But Hardy fails to integrate these different fictional modes, and this tentativeness may also be seen in his excessively 49 NII-Electronic Library Service Sendai Shirayuri Women's College YOSHINO Satoko pedantic use of literary and biblical allusions at inappropriate points in the narrative. Desperate Remedies also has affinities with the Victorian popular theater. Such plays sought to thrill their audiences by using various conventional devices ; improbability mattered little and their sub- ject-matter might include the supernatural or demonic. The conflict between good and evil was usually wrought between an implacably evil villain and a strikingly virtuous heroine, and sensationalism of incident was heightened by unsubtle, forceful acting.
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