Hardy's Fiction, 1871-1886 29

Hardy's Fiction, 1871-1886 29 all but last shaped by his desire at once to challenge and to keep within the demands 'of the dominant form, the three-decker CHAPTER 2 novel, withitsestablishedmodeofpublication: first as a serialin periodicals intendedfor middle-class family reading, then later in an expensive three-volume format which sold primarily to Hardy's Fiction, 1871-1886 lending libraries, whose owners were enabled thereby to exercise a substantial degree of influence over the publishing houses.! Hardy's difficulties in his unsuccessful attempts to In the Prefatory Note to Desperate Remedies, written some publishhis first novel, The Poor Man and the Lady, showhbwthe twenty years after the novel itself, Hardy describes himselfin evidently radical political content ofthe work was undermined retrospect as a young author 'feeling his way to a method' by the traditions ofrealism, allowing Alexander Macmillan to (p. 35). Andindeed, oneofthemostnotable aspects ofhisearlier elide his political objection to Hardy's class-partisanship with work is the diversity of forms and approaches which he that concern with verisimilitude which the idea of a mimetic attempts. Each novel emerges as a kind of corrective or a realism invites. He praises the 'admirable' and 'truthful' reaction against its predecessor, so that the minimally plotted account of the working-men's lives, but is scandalised and and consciously archaic Under the Greenwood Tree follows the frightened by Hardy's presentation ofthe other characters: dense plot and contemporary setting ofDesperate Remedies, and But it seems to me that your black wash will not be recognised as any the ironic comedy The Hand ofEthelberta is succeeded by the thing more than ignorant misrepresentation. Of course, I don't know ambitiously tragic Return ofthe Native. Hardy's process ofex what opportunities you have had ofseeing the class you deal with.... perimentation is unusually overt. Yet throughout this feeling But it is inconceivable to me that any considerable number of human beings - God's creatures - should be so bad without going to utter wreck ofthe way there remains a consistent attempt to accommodate in a week. 2 that whichis unusual orinnovatory to normative popular taste; for Hardy held strong preconceptions about public taste, not Hardy's adaptation of the challenging to his sense of the necessarily corresponding to the views ofhis actual or potential publicly acceptable takes various forms. One obvious instance readership. Witha bitterness inpart self-directed, he repeatedly is the sometimes strained emulation ofauthoritatively artistic calls attention to this accommodation. His sensitivity to criti models; his frequently recherche comparisons and heavily cism is apparent from the first, and his reaction is commonly cultural allusions have on occasion been interpreted as the defensive rather than defiant, so that instead of writing or hallmark ofthe humourless autodidact, but they surely func re-writing The Return ofthe Native to whatheproclaims to beits tion rather as a kind ofcredentialofthe seriousness ofthe work, correct austere ending, he merely adumbrates this alternative guaranteeing its attempt to place itselfwithin the traditions of conclusion in a footnote; he follows the same procedure with 'fine writing'. Another example is the presentation ofsexual the story 'The Distracted Preacher'; and he continually suc encounters in a manner so metaphorical or symbolic that they cumbs, with however bad a grace, to the exigencies of the can be recuperated into the family serial: Troy's phallic sword family serial. He defends what may be controversial in his pIay, which leaves Bathsheba feeling 'likeonewho has sinned a novels - The Hand ofEthelberta, ortheendofThe Woodlanders great sin' (p. 206), still found a place in the novel, while Leslie by an indictment of public taste or of his failure to judge it Stephen, editorofthe Cornhill where the serial appeared, raised correctly: Ethelberta, he writes, suffered 'for its quality of gingerly objections to the account ofFanny's illegitimate child unexpectedness in particular', and he remarks in a 1912 in her coffin. Similarlyoblique, thoughnotably less successful, addition to this Preface that the book, 'appeared thirty-five is the way in which CythereaGraye's sexual attraction towards years too soon' (pp. 31-2). Hardy's fiction, then, is from first to Aeneas Manston, in Desperate Remedies, is conveyed through ~ 0 Thomas Hardy and Women Hardy's Fiction, 1871-1886 31 3 ! 'I herstirred response to his virtuosityat theorganin the middleof employing the stereotype as such; Under the Greenwood Tree is a a thunderstorm. The explicit - however mild its erotic or consciously - even self-consciously - conventional work. sexual content - was subject to editorial censorship, while the I! Fancy Day is not the only type-figure in the book, for the male implicit largely escaped. In Hardy's later works, this was to characters are just as generically pre-determined, and the reach absurd proportions; so, as has been often remarked, the patronising narrative tone extends beyond her to include all the serial version of Tess of the d'Urbervilles had to show Clare 'rustics', as they are commonly - and here perhaps fairly ridiculously transporting the female dairy-workers through known. A sense of effort is evident behind this narrative the puddles in a handy wheelbarrow in order to obviate any condescension, in the proliferation of quaint names and odd suggestionofdirect physical contact, but the imageryofphalhc appearances bestowed on these characters. 4 After the cool penetration and the transposed seduction scene in which Alex reception of Desperate Remedies, Hardy seems consciously to persuades the reluctant girl to take a strawberryinto her mouth have aimed at a work with a respectable lineage ofgenre. In a remained intact. A further, and interestingly ambiguous, form letter written to Macmillan while the book was on offer to ofthis adaptionisrecurrent: thetawdryequivocationsoverlegal them, he refers at length to reviews ofthe earlier novel before marriage - Viviette's unconsciously bigamous marriage with concluding that 'It seemed that upon the whole a pastoral story Swithin St Cleeve, or thefalsified ceremoniesin the manuscript would be the safest venture. 's Congruentwiththis urge towards of The Return ofthe Native and the serial version of Tess - are the safe and respectable is the superior and yet ingratiating tone quite clearly a half-cynical obeisance to convention, which of the narrator; the novel's narrative voice is curiously and nevertheless scarcely disguise the illicit sexual nature of the uncharacteristically masculine, perhaps denoting an overstre relationships involved. By exercising this kind ofimaginative nuous effort to insinuate into the confidence ofthe projected pre-censorship of his own, Hardy managed on the whole to reader. The novel reader may be traditionally female, but the retain the sexual character ofsuch episodes, while at the same authoritative role of novel-narrator had so far been largely time preserving the decencies ofthe three-decker. It is in those presumed male, as the male pseudonyms and assertively male novels usually called 'minor' or 'failed' - those which Hardy tone adopted by so many mid-nineteenth-century women himselfplaced in the categories 'Romances and Fantasies' and writers - thenarratorinGeorgeEliot's Adam Bedeis an 0 bVlous 'Novels of Ingenuity' - that the search for a form most evi example - would suggest. dently revolves upon the problem ofthe female characters. The Through her role in the plot of Under the Greenwood Tree, originality and vitality of the central women in these novels Fancy Day also provides a near paradigm for Hardy's recurring provokes an uncertainty ofgenre and tone which unsettles the central fable. The novel focuses on her choice among possible fictional modes in a disturbing andoftenproductive manner. In lovers, a choice made in relative freedom from the most the 'successful' earlier novels, by contrast, Hardy runs closer to tangible forms of female dependency, parental control and the established genres ofpastoral and tragedy. direct financial pressure. Differences in class and education Under the Greenwood Tree, still often described in such terms among the various men accentuate the gap between the Fancy as Irving Howe's 'a masterpiece in miniature',3 provides an andthehusbandofherchoice, and the lateradditionofMaybold example. Fancy Day conforms almost exactly to the unfavour to therosteroflovers may well havebeenintendedto emphasise able literary stereotype of female character in her vanity, this element. These and other factors cause a series ofhesita i fickleness, whimsical inconsequentiality, and coquetry. She 1< tions, misgivings and recantations before the original choice is lacks what this image would have her lack: personal sexual I finally confirmed. What is unusual here is the resolution ofthe identity (as opposed to generalised gender identity), genuine plot in a marriage clearly to be seen as successful, despite the feeling, independence ofthought, considerationin the exercise mild threat of Fancy's 'secret she would never tell' (p. 192), of her will. Here, it should be noticed, Hardy is clearly which is rather a last irony at her expense than an equivalent to :1 Thomas Hardy and Women Hardy's Fiction, 1871-1886 33 the damaging sexual secrets of Elfride Swancourt or Tess Farfrom the Madding Crowdis notonly the storyoftheeducation Durbeyfield.

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