Essays on Hardy

BOOK REVIEWS Essays on Hardy Charles P. C. Pettit, ed. Celebrating Thomas Hardy: Insights and Appreciations . New York: St. Martin's Press, 1996. xv + 200 pp. $59.95 CHARLES PETTITS VOLUME features eleven key lectures delivered at the 1994 International Thomas Hardy Conference in Dorchester. In his preface, the editor stresses the oral, informal nature of the papers and his hopes for a "resulting vitality" to "enhance the appeal of the book [for] Hardy enthusiasts and students." Both Pettit and Furse Swann, the original organizer of the Hardy conference, note the inclusion of personal and academic papers, an act and a taxonomy designed to indicate the validity of diverse "voices" and responses to Hardy. In Pettit's words, "some papers are stringent and searching literary criticism of specific aspects of Hardy's achievement, while others are simply personal appreciation of Hardy's achievement as a whole." Such categories —appeal to enthusiasts and scholars, diversity of voice, stringent criticism, and unbounded appreciation—will form the basis of my own evaluation of the volume. In the last category, the volume fares well. For the essays both by literary scholars and by Hardy aficionados, the general rubric of "celebrating Thomas Hardy" is apt: the various essays praise his poetic apprehension of the sensual world (Gibson); his ability to transform loss into poetic expression (Lerner); his articulation of the rural landscape and language (Blythe, Levi); his sophisticated play with decadent notions of the unstable margins between vitality and decay (Beer); his creation of subversive female protagonists (Curtis, Morgan); and his continued relevance for late twentieth-century readers (Rothermel, Blishen). Each essay contains multiple, laudatory statements about Hardy—who generally is assumed to be the transparent, narrative voice of the literature—and, collectively, the papers convey the group's essential agreement about Hardy's appeal as a person and a writer. The strengths of these collected readings lie in their encouragement of a dialogue between academic and non-academic writers, as well as the suggestion that enjoyment enhances, not mars, analysis. The papers avoid specialized language and involved colloquy; as a result, the predominantly general discussions of Hardy's beliefs, life, or writing should be comprehensible to a large and varied readership, while the personal passion of the essayists should serve as a welcome reminder of the critic's other role of pleasure reader. Yet bringing these two roles together into 77 ELT 41: 1 1998 an equal and productive relationship in writing can be difficult: celebratory writing may invite essays that fail to note their own positions within a constantly evolving critical tradition or that simplify the nineteenthcentury author and text in order to offer an unqualified tributes. Consider Michael Millgate's "'Wives All': Emma and Florence Hardy," an essay which evokes a complex Hardy, but then dismisses this construction in favour of trenchant defense: There may be . .. little point in blaming Hardy overmuch for his dominance over both his wives, for the selfishness of which Emma accused him, for his exploitation of Florence's secretarial skills, or for those long hours of inviolable isolation in his study that so often left Florence, as she once said, with only the dog Wessex for company and conversation. Given... that Hardy was a great artist, marvellously creative even into extreme old age, then his errors and faults and marital offences seem to rank well down by comparison with those of other admired artists. From the start of his essay, Millgate sets up the binary structure of the talented versus the mediocre, the significant versus the trivial, and the blameless versus the blameworthy, assuring readers that both wives would have no place in the popular or literary imagination, were it not for their fortuitous marital alliance. Both women remain firmly outside of the category of "great artist," and their common obscurity leaves them as open to blame for their respective marriages to Hardy as his "greatness " excuses him from it. Though the article attempts to treat with seriousness the personal and social concerns manifest in the letters of the "wives all," Millgate frames and punctuates the article with tributes to Hardy that endorse a hierarchy based on sex and status. Yet if, as Millgate asserts elsewhere in...