The Relationship of Hardy's Temperament to His Novels

Marjory, who court and then conduct a marriage which is celibate at her request while they search for treasure and fend off villains who try to kidnap her. Roth notes that "there is no Oedipal rivalry, no father figure, and no ambivalence toward the female. Moveover, the hero and heroine . . . function as equal partners." Because of these qualities she finds the story "uncharacteristic for Stoker" (p. 105). She has missed, I think, the point that Marjory has been embarrassed at the start by giving Archie a spontaneous, friendly kiss, that she keeps herself from him physically as his wife, and that at the end she tacitly becomes his sexual partner and vows to "never willingly leave my husband's side again" (MS_, p. 453). The theme of love's sexuality is present but obscure in The Man (1905), and it is explicit in the last novel of the group, Lady Athlyne (1908), In which an American girl falls in love with a Britisher, wakes up one morning in the same bedroom with him, and tells her outraged father she regrets that she is still chaste. The narrator declares, "It is a mistake to suppose . . . that the love of a man and a woman is, even at its very highest, devoid of physical emotion. . . . The world of the flesh is real" (pp. 168-69). Of this novel Roth notes only that it ends with its "two protagonists . . . locked in a triangular embrace including the heroine 's father, an awkward image of which unfortunately Stoker was especially fond" (p. 23). The image is not "awkward," however, because in this novel as in The Mystery of the Sea and The Man Stoker has made the naturalness of sexual love his theme. Stoker's fiction clearly implies not only a mechanistic, unconscious authorial psyche but also an active consciousness responding to the ideas of its time and place. A study of his literary work should consider him not simply as a victim of Freudian neuroses but also as a disciple of such predecessors as Tennyson and Whitman and an alert contemporary of the New Woman and the sort of sexual liberation preached, for example, by Havelock Ellis. Alan Johnson Arizona State University 3. THE RELATIONSHIP OF HARDY'S TEMPERAMENT TO HIS NOVELS Peter J. Casagrande. Unity in Hardy's Novels: 'Repetitive Symmetries.' Lawrence, KS: The Regents Press of Kansas; London: Macmillan, 1982. $25.00 Unity in Hardy's Novels is an interesting but troublesome examination of Hardy's "deterioristic mode of regard" and the influence of this temperament on his work. Peter Casagrande offers some insight into Hardy's life and suggests unifying characteristics in the novels, but this study contains a number of problems for serious readers of Hardy. Casagrande has arranged his discussion "around the premise that there is a pattern and a unity in Hardy's novels, and that by describing this pattern we can discern a unity, that is, a number of structural and thematic kinships and concerns that can help us to view the novels as parts of a single process and as expressions of a particular temperament." He develops two classifications: the major novels of return (Under the Greenwood Tree, The Return of the Native, and The Woodlanders), and the major novels of restoration (Far From the Madding Crowd, The Mayor of Casterbridge, Tess, and Jude) , all of which have their antecedents or rehearsals in early or minor novels, such as Madding Crowd and Tess in A Pair of Blue Eyes; Return in A Laodicean; Mayor in The Trumpet-Major, A Laodicean, and Two 137 on a Tower. Behind these two lines of development lies a single unifying vision: deteriorism, "the view that time, history and consciousness are caught up in an irreversible process of decline or decay." Casagrande finds the roots of Hardy's deterioristlc mode of regard in "four encounters with irretrievable loss" that occurrred between 1840 and 1880: (1) his personal and social separation by education, work, and marriage from his beloved family, natal spot, and "an almost ghostly 'simpler self that for him always resided at Higher Bockhampton"; (2) the failure of his marriage to Emma Gifford; (3) "his rejection of Christian supernaturalism, in...