Hardy's Fables of Self

ELT: VOLUME35:3 1992 has not yet come to hand. After The Yellow Book ceased publication, EUa also published more stories than Anderson suggests. Some uncertainties about the primary bibliography may have come from D'Arcy's own unreliable memory. For example, Katherine Mix, whose information came mainly from D'Arcy herself, stated in A Study in Yellow that "[o]ne of her first stories was accepted by Dickens for All the Year Round." With D'Arcy's birth occurring in 1856 or 1857 and Dickens's death in 1870, either the former was a prodigy or else supernatural forces had to have intervened in this situation! If indeed a D'Arcy story was taken by the famous periodical, which continued long after the founder's death, I have not been able to locate it or information that would verify its publication there. Nonetheless, several other commentators have recorded this as fact. I have also found one piece of nonfiction, an essay on art, which seems likely to have come from Mr. "Page." Lest I seem to be giving more caveats than positive response, I hasten to observe that, in my estimation, any bit of writing by or about Ella D'Arcy that can be made available ought to be considered worthwhile. Alan Anderson has made a brave beginning in what is one of the murky areas in 1890s exploration. D'Arcy's story "Irremediable," in the first volume of The Yellow Book, brought her immediate—if not always approving—attention, and it has been cited as among the best pieces of short fiction in the 90s. 'Poor Cousin Louis," in the second volume of The Yellow Book, D'Arcy's first story about the Channel Islands, was also popular among her contemporaries, and it has continued to win readers long afterward. Moreover, D'Arcy's early training in painting provided her with another string to her bow, making her, like Beerbohm, Laurence and Clémence Housman, Beardsley—and like the Pre-Raphaelites before them—one of those whose works drew in elements from both arts. What we find in the letters furnished by Alan Anderson only enhances D'Arcy's significance as a signal figure during an era of ferment. All in all, she should not suffer from further neglect. Benjamin Franklin Fisher IV University of Mississippi Hardy's Fables of Self Marjorie Garson. Hardy's Fables of Integrity: Woman, Body, Text. New York: Clarendon Press, 1991. viii + 198 pp. $52.00 THE SEASONED READER of Hardy's novels, of their criticism, and of literary theory, will find in Marjorie Garson's study many interesting, 338 BOOK REVIEWS even startling, insights: e.g., that Giles Winterborne oîThe Woodlanders is a victim of rape, and that Tess was a novel in which Hardy fully intended to challenge the existing social order. This same reader will also find Fables of Integrity carefully and instructively researched. Garson seems to have read all the criticism of the novels, and she uses other critics—briefly and accurately—not as straw figures, but as thinkers with their own tales to tell. What is more, Garson brings to bear in various ways the theoretical insights of Jacques Lacan, Fredric Jameson , Jane Gallop, Mary Jacobus, and others. In short, Garson writes for the prepared reader. The reader unacquainted with the paths of Hardy criticism of the last hundred years, or the reader indifferent to literary theory, may find Garson's text formidable, perhaps at times impenetrable. This reader may find merely abstract her stated purpose: to read the seven major novels as "fables about the constitution of the self and about its inevitable dissolution." For by her own admission, these "fables of self" live a secret life in the novels. There is a "mythic subtext in many of Hardy's novels . . . [whose] plot takes shape around a number of figures who return, again and again, ... to subvert the . . . patterns established on the surface of the narrative." The chief players in this Oedipal drama are the Son, the weak or absent Father, and the powerful, sometimes destructive Mother. There are other figures as well, and all work, according to Garson, to expose "male fragmentation." Garson's insertion...