Hardy and the Erotic

Transcription

1 HARDY AND THE EROTIC

2 Hardy and the Erotic T. R. Wright Lecturer in English The University of Newcastle upon Tyne Palgrave Macmillan

3 ISBN ISBN (ebook) DOI / T. R. Wright 1989 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition All rights reserved. For information, write: Scholarly & Reference Division, St. Martin's Press, Inc., 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY First published in the United States of America in 1989 Typeset by Goodfellow & Egan Ltd, Cambridge ISBN Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Wright, T. R. (Terence R.), Hardy and the erotic. / T.R. Wright. p. cm. Bibliography: p. Includes index. ISBN Hardy, Thomas, Criticism and interpretation. 2. Sex in literature. 3. Women in literature. 4. Erotic stories, English History and criticism. I. Title. PR4757.S48W '.8--dc CIP

4 To Gabriele

5 Contents Preface ix 1 Wessexuality: A Theoretical Introduction 1 2 Hardy on Himself: The Life and the Loves 20 3 Obscure Objects of Desire: The Early Novels 34 4 Women as Subjects: Romances and Fantasies 49 5 A Question of Manliness: Henchard and Fitzpiers 72 6 Diabolical Dames and Grotesque Desires: The Short Stories 89 7 Tess of the d'urbervilles: A Pure Woman? Sue Bridehead: A New Woman The Well-Beloved: The End of Art and Desire 132 Bibliography 143 Index 148 vii

6 Preface In choosing a subject such as this, I am only too conscious of arousing and then disappointing false expectations. Hardy's understanding of the erotic, his transformation of desire into art, I should emphasise from the beginning, is an intensely serious business. It is also predominantly cerebral. The erotic, as I explain in the introduction, is a 'fiction', a cultural phenomenon, a product of human perception and distortion of the biological 'facts' of sex. Hardy both celebrates and deplores this distance between culture and nature, a difference which opens up vistas of voyeuristic delight and artistic play but also creates a tragic gulf between desire, which is subjective and insatiable, and fulfilment, which is always partial and limited by the contingencies of the external world. Disappointment, in other words, is an inevitable feature of the erotic. I should also explain that this book focuses on the erotic world of Hardy'S fiction. It does not explore the poetry, except where this relates directly to the prose, partly for practical reasons (there was no space) but also because the focus in Hardy's lyrics upon the departed moment, most evident in the poems of , is fundamentally elegiac rather than erotic. My argument in what follows will be that Hardy's fiction explores both the delights and dangers of the erotic, displaying a growing awareness of the tension between his erotic perception of women as objects and his sympathy with their suffering as subjects. His last novel, The Well-Beloved, can be read as a final abandonment of the erotic delights of fiction, a closing of this particular phase of his writing. Much could be said about the erotic dimension of his poetry but that will have to wait for another book. I should like to thank all those who have helped in the production of this book, including Frances Arnold for her ix

7 x Preface encouragement, Gillian Beaumont of Stenton Associates for her careful copy-editing, and my wife, Gabriele, to whose patient understanding and tolerance this book is dedicated.