Hardy Companion

Book Reviews Hardy Companion Dale Kramer, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Hardy. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999. xxvi + 231 pp. Cloth $54.95 Paper $19.95 THE CONTRIBUTORS to The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Hardy are among the most seasoned and authoritative in the Hardy canon of criticism. In fact, most of them—Penny Boumelha, the late Kristin Brady, Simon Gatrell, Dale Kramer, Norman Page, John Paul Riquelme, Robert Schweik, Linda Shires, Dennis Taylor, and Peter Widdowson —have been the editors of Hardy novels published by W W. Norton , Penguin, Oxford World's Classics, Everyman, Clarendon, and Bedford. Accordingly, the most impressive thing about this collection is each critic's detailed and wide-ranging knowledge of Hardy's texts. In an essay on "Art and Aesthetics," for example, Norman Page argues that Hardy was profoundly influenced by nonliterary arts, pulling examples from the Life and Work, Hardy's prefaces, the poetry, and the novels with elegance and ease. Simon Gatrell's "Wessex" covers in wonderful detail the evolution of "Hardy country" in the author's imagination and in twentieth-century interpretations of his life and work. Similarly, Robert Schweik handles the complex religious, scientific, and philosophical influences on Hardy's writing with brief, pertinent references to, seemingly , all the novels, and Hardy's notebooks and poetry. One gets the impression that these critics could find their way around Hardy's texts blindfolded. This edition, then, is more than competent as a "companion" or introduction to Hardy, and it would be a fine supplement in an undergraduate or graduate course on the author. The essays are overarching, for the most part, rather than readings of specific works: Michael Millgate offers an overview of biographical sources; Peter Widdowson gives a history of twentieth-century Hardy criticism; Kristin Brady discusses Hardy "and matters of gender"; Jakob Lothe looks at Hardy and Victorian ideas about tragedy; Dennis Taylor and John Paul Riquelme place Hardy's poetry in the context, respectively, of nineteenth-century and modernist aesthetics. All of the essays are short, clearly written, and convincingly argued. 465 ELT 43 : 4 2000 Still, I felt somehow that I had been here before. In his preface, Dale Kramer writes, "A significant inducement to read and study Hardy at the present time arises from his paradoxical relationship with literary criticism." Yet he goes on to say "the essays in this volume do not comprise a critical sampler," chiefly because Hardy is "peculiarly resistant to Procrustean beds and critics with agendas." This is why we like Hardy, of course, and several of the essays make particular reference to Hardy's famous definition of art as "a disproportioning," his love of incongruities, the paradoxical dimensions of his work. Yet it seems to me that the best essays in the book are those explicitly informed by critical theory, or those that argue for particular readings of specific novels. Penny Boumelha's "The Patriarchy of Class: Under the Greenwood Tree, Far from the Madding Crowd, The Woodlanders" is an illuminating discussion of the intersection of class and gender in "the plot of marital choice." Boumelha shows that Hardy often used the conventions of the pastoral mode—seasonal cycles, the hero's fruitful labor, courtship rituals , and symbolic rural activities—in order to self-consciously question the values of such a society. "Rural society, for Hardy, is just that: a society " and relationships among characters are always specifically socioeconomic , even as Hardy employs a discourse of pastoral romance. This essay raises pertinent questions about Hardy's "obsessive" concern with cross-class romance. "Indeed," writes Boumelha, "it might even seem that, under the constraints posed by nineteenth-century publishing conventions , experimentation with class position stands in for its sexual equivalent." Boumelha's Marxist-feminist approach (surely not driven by an "agenda") opens these texts to further scrutiny and is a model of observant critical reading. Another excellent essay is Linda Shires's "The Radical Aesthetic of Tess of the d'Urbervilles," which discusses Hardy's efforts to subvert realism and traditional representations and beliefs. Shires reads the second chapter of Tess describing Marlott and the "Vale of Blakemore or Blackmore" as emblematic of Hardy's technique: "Hardy's aesthetic demands...