Thomas Hardy, Femininity and Dissent: Reassessing the Minor Novels (review)

Thomas Hardy, Femininity and Dissent: Reassessing the Minor Novels, by Jane Thomas; pp. xx + 172. Basingstoke: Macmillan; New York: St. Martin's Press, 1999, £42.82, $59.95.

In Thomas Hardy, Femininity and Dissent: Reassessing the Minor Novels, Jane Thomas provides feminist interpretations of six of Hardy's critically neglected novels--Desperate Remedies (1871), A Pair of Blue Eyes (1873), The Hand of Ethelberta (1876), A Laodicean (1881), Two on a Tower (1886), and The Well-Beloved (1897). Such a project immediately raises a question of motivation. The critic assumes the burden of demonstrating both the salience of new criteria for evaluating the works and the gain in information or pleasure offered by a reconsideration. While, as Thomas points out, "Hardy's neglected novels [. . .] represent a significant percentage of his literary oeuvre" (4), their bulk alone does not necessitate their reassessment. In this case, the critical concern with representations of women and gender that has distinguished Hardy criticism of the last several decades also motivates Thomas's analysis. She offers her readings as "a supplement to existing feminist readings of his prose work which focus, most exclusively, on the canonical texts" (4). These novels offer fresh opportunities for an elaboration of Hardy's "focus on the process by which female subjectivity is constructed at a time of social crisis and change" (51). More specifically, Thomas links the qualities of artifice and contrivance attributed to Hardy's minor novels with their theme of female self-construction.

As the twenty-six-year span of publication dates indicates, Hardy produced works considered minor throughout his prolific career. The "Novels of Ingenuity" and "Romances and Fantasies"--the categories in which Hardy, in the 1912 "General Preface" to his collected works, placed his minor novels--were not superceded by, but rather coexisted with, the "Novels of Character and Environment," which display the more critically valued qualities of naturalism and psychological verisimilitude. His retrospective categorization, as Thomas describes it, "deliberately distances the six least [critically] successful texts" (8) from those that secured his reputation within the "Great Tradition" of English social realism. As Thomas points out, however, recent criticism has challenged this distancing. Peter Widdowson, for example, in his Hardy in History (1989), finds the critical denigration of the minor novels to be part of a conspiracy of the institutions of "criticism, education, publishing, the media and the film industry [in England]" to use Hardy to "endorse the ideological reading of 'reality' which constitutes realism" (qtd. 8-9). Reintroducing the minor novels into Hardy's canon, in this view, has the salutary effect of disrupting a naturalization and celebration of realism that serves the ideological interests of the bourgeoisie.

Thomas accepts the distinction between the more consistent attention to psychological verisimilitude of the critically favored novels and the greater artifice of those neglected. She points out, however, that an approach such as Widdowson's, while questioning the ideological premises of the distinction between "major" and "minor" works, remains silent about ideologies of gender within the works themselves. Thomas's readings, by contrast, persuasively assert a connection between the novels' narrative artifice and their female protagonists' reliance on artificial and strategic modes of self-presentation to challenge patriarchal power. Her chapter on Desperate Remedies, for example, draws connections among the novel's theatrical structure, which allows chapter headings announcing the passage of time to "work like the acts and scenes of a play" (54); the false marriages that drive its sensational plot; and the narrow range of socially constructed female "roles" available to its impoverished heroine, Cytherea Graye. Similarly, in A Laodicean, both a public baptism and a benefit performance of Love's Labour's Lost cast the resistant protagonist, Paula Power, in the role of object of the masculine gaze. A game of chess in A Pair of Blue Eyes becomes a metaphor for the sexual subjugation of the heroine, and in Thomas's reading of The Hand of Ethelberta the gaming...