Thomas Hardy, Sensationalism, and the Melodramatic Mode by Richard Nemesvari (review)

A decade ago patricia Ingham defied more than a century of critical consensus by insisting that for Thomas Hardy the writing of his first published novel, the sensation novel Desperate Remedies (1871), did not represent “a deviation from … [his] natural narrative mode, a detour on the way to his mature novels,” but rather the discovery of “the medium that became uniquely his” (introduction, Desperate Remedies [Oxford University Press, 2003], xxvi). Richard Nemesvari’s Thomas Hardy, Sensationalism, and the Melodramatic Mode not only confirms that sensationalist and melodramatic impulses inform Hardy’s novels, both the non-canonical and the canonical, but also boldly argues that Hardy deliberately exploited the conventions of melodrama and sensation fiction in order to expose and critique bourgeois social mores. Situating his argument in relation to Peter Brooks’s still influential study, The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess (1976), Nemesvari claims that, for Hardy, “the purpose of the melodramatic imagination is to generate a ‘disproportioning’ of perception in order to force a recognition of ideologies that might otherwise remain invisible to the encultured subject, and it is precisely melodrama’s refusal to accept the ‘realities’ of status quo discourse that make it such a potent tool for challenging Victorian conventionalities” (4).

Nemesvari rightly emphasizes both Hardy’s profound debt to the oral storytelling traditions of his childhood and his lifelong insistence that he was a teller of tales exceptional enough to justify their telling. Nemesvari also argues convincingly that as a young man Hardy would have been more familiar than has generally been assumed with stage melodrama, sensation fiction, and the controversies surrounding the two genres. Nemesvari’s suggestion that Hardy recognized and consciously exploited the subversive potential of the melodramatic mode is more problematic: he insists that Hardy’s “refusal to limit himself to … [a realistic] aesthetic is based on choice, not inability,” but does not substantiate this claim (165). What he does compellingly demonstrate through thought-provoking readings of six novels is that there are integral connections among melodrama, sensation fiction, and Hardy’s novels, particularly with respect to the methods used to question and destabilize conventional constructions of gender and social class.

In 1912 Hardy arranged and classified his fiction for Macmillan’s Wessex Edition, effectively canonizing nine “Novels of Character and Environment,” awarding middling status to five “Romances and Fantasies,” and relegating to the margins three “Novels of Ingenuity.” One of the most innovative—and appropriately ingenious—aspects of Nemesvari’s study is his decision to pair each of the Novels of Ingenuity with a Novel of Character and Environment. The first of his three sections juxtaposes Desperate Remedies and The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886) to explore the anxieties associated with middle-class masculinity and the struggle to find stable sexual and socioeconomic definitions. Particularly noteworthy is Nemesvari’s incisive reading of the self-dramatizing Michael Henchard as a representative of “melodramatic masculinity,” whose performance of hypermasculinity, beginning with the sale of his wife and subsequent temperance vow (demonstrating the self-discipline required for upward social mobility), is irrevocably subverted when he breaks down during the fight with Donald Farfrae: “the text’s emphasis on the performativity of his melodramatic manliness illustrates that it is not as foundational as he, or Hardy’s audience, might think” (70).

It is a testament to the richness of Nemesvari’s explorations that some of his most thought-provoking ideas are presented as incidental to his primary arguments. For example, he observes almost as an aside that Henchard’s association with oral culture links him to the origins of melodrama, while Farfrae’s modern preference for the written aligns him with “document-based, bourgeois realism,” an astute point that, in view of Hardy’s sympathetic representation of Henchard, could have been developed in support of Nemesvari’s claim that Hardy resisted the paradigms of realism throughout his career (52).

For Nemesvari the purpose of that resistance is always to...