Feminist Perspectives on Hardy

BOOK REVIEWS refrains from throwing the baby out with the bathwater. As such this book succeeds quite well. Janet Galligani Casey ------------------- College of the Holy Cross Feminist Perspectives on Hardy Margaret Higonnet, ed. The Sense of Sex: Feminist Perspectives on Hardy. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993. 270 pp. Cloth $42.50 Paper $15.95 THE QUESTIONS RAISED by the title of this book are many. In the age of porn it is natural, though possibly not altogether discreet, to label even an academic book The Sense of Sex. But what exactly is this sense? It can't be the sixth (that being accounted for) so it must be the (lucky) seventh. The subtitle tells us that Hardy wiU be the subject of scrutiny, so it must be Hardy's sense of sex that is to be brought to light, and by means of feminist perspectives. What are these? The views of people who have been reading Hardy's novels, evidently, and evidently it is not necessary for these people to know much about Hardy. The contributors to the book all touch the forelock to the Masters of Discourse : Freud, Barthes, Lacan, Foucault (all patriarchs, one observes, though two GaUic females are now added: Cixous, Kristeva). The contributors do not, however, show famUiarity with, as it were, the Masters of Hardy. These latter have been so assiduous that an abundance of information on Hardy is now in the public domain, all about his work and days and drafts, his loves and hates, his dishonesties. AU these matters one would have supposed essential to a "perspectivist" wishing to form opinions about the author. Evidently not. These matters of fact are largely ignored. What then is a feminist perspective? Does it have to be of a patriarchal novel? Who is entitled to have one? What is it worth and what is its relation to the mysterious sense of sex? The book should answer all these questions if the introduction f aus to, as it does, because it is so expertly encoded as to be quite unintelligible. Penny Boumelha, who is the author of a well-reviewed book on Hardy, supplies a cogent article on Ethelberta, one might suppose an especiaUy congenial heroine for feminists. What I find surprising here is the author's relative neglect of the primary situation of Ethelberta who is so entrepreneurial a wage-earner·—and in the arts, indeed Hardy's one example of an intellectually working woman, and in this respect exceeding all the men. (Her virtuous ambition is, of course, to raise her famUy 85 ELT 37:1 1994 socially and financially.) Moreover the circumstance that she manages her own marriage plot (only defeated by the superior cleverness of her old but high class suitor) is also unique in Hardy. Boumelha talks only about the marriage plot and her comparison of Elfrida with Elizabeth Bennett is not especiaUy apt. Elizabeth Langford's "Becoming a Man in Jude the Obscure" provides no new insight into that controversial novel. Ignoring Hardy as author and the light already shed on the text by study of textual changes (e.g. Phillotson's late introduction into the story), she reduces Jude to this or that sexual generalization. Linda Shire's contribution (reprinted here) substitutes formulaic discourse for sense. The subject is "Power in Far from the Madding Crowd." The redefinitions proposed in the novel serve no agenda in particular except growing uncertainty at the end of the nineteenth century about "What is woman?" Why should it be supposed that a novel serves any agenda? Hardy would have deplored any such expectation. Margaret Higonnet's own contribution (republished here) is as ritualistic , as code-bound, as her introduction. She asks, "Can a man implicated in patriarchy speak for a woman constrained by it?" (15) Well, this has been happening for a long while and with considerable acclaim: Sophocles, say, for Antigone or Aeschylus for Clytemnestra and Cassandra or VergU for Dido or Racine for Phèdre or Chaucer for Criseyde and the Wyf of Bath or Shakespeare for a number of ladies. Ignoring these notable examples, Higonnet concludes that it is problematical how Hardy could have included the female of the species...