Aesthetic Experience and Literary Hermeneutics (review)

133 reviews vaUdity of any one perspective. These ideologies are manifested in the text in different styles or genres: pastoral, realist, and tragic. Had Boumelha pursued this Une through close readings of several novels, she would have accomplished much. Two of her chapters, however, explore the context for Hardy's work, presumably in an effort to identify the competing ideologies on which he drew. The first, entitled "Sexual Ideology and the 'Nature' of Woman, 1880-1900," surveys sociological and medical writing about women's sexuality, touching on how this material was received by feminists and socialists. The focus and purpose of the chapter are not clear, and she concludes with the simple observation that female nature was "problematic" during this period and that female sexuality was "constructed." Her fourth chapter, "Women and the New Fiction 1880-1900," is her most interesting; here the research into context has some direct pay-offin her reading ofJude the Obscure. It has even greater general value in discriminating between the ideals of "womanUness" (dependency, woman's sphere) and "womanhood," as developed in the New Woman fiction ; Boumelha does a particularly nice job in establishing the conservative core ofthe purportedly radical ideal of "womanhood" with its appeal to nature and physiology in defining what women should be. One would Uke to see this work appUed to Tess more concretely than she does. In addition to thesis and research in context, Boumelha shapes her book around a development in Hardy's fiction: The Return of the Native is structured around a marital tragedy, with the male's a tragedy of inteUect, the female's a subordinate one of sexuaUty; in Tess the woman's tragedy of sexuaUty is primary, Angel's intellectual disorder subordinate ; in Jude Hardy achieves a successful double tragedy in which both male and female are shattered in mind and body. All of these projects are worthwhile, but none is pursued systematically enough to be coherent and convincing. Chapter Two, "Hardy's Fiction, 1871-1886," is egregiously lacking in focus. The later chapters on Tess and Jude respectively are more successful, but even here Boumelha hops from one concern to another—and I have scarcely touched on all her concerns, which range from Jude's class situation to the problem of materiality of consciousness in a post-Darwinian era to the state ofthe holograph. In short, Boumelha tries to do too much. The paragraphing reflects her organization problems, one beginning on p. 140 and concluding two pages later. Her language is often trendy to no purpose: "this irruption of the feminine into the novel" (73), "a shared code ofnarrator and reader" (57), "the ideology of womanhood that . . . recuperates desire into instinct" (89). Ethelberta "takes speech for herself, and in doing so transgresses aU the determinations of class and kin" (42), Tess "is not merely spoken by the narrator, but also spoken for" (120), and Sue is "reduced from a challenging articulacy to a . . . silence [which] ironically dupUcates the death of Jude" (154): all of which might have some point were these remarks developed anywhere else in this book. And a final complaint: the number oftypographical errors is embarrassing. I surmise that the book is a dissertation hurried into print which should have had more time in the cask to mature. PATRICIA ALDEN Hans Robert Jauss. Aesthetic ExperienceandLiteraryHermeneutics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982. 357 pp. $29.50 (cloth); $12.95 (paper). The work of Hans Robert Jauss has played an important role in the new critical series, "Theory and History of Literature." Two of the first three volumes are by Jauss, Toward an Aesthetic of Reception (vol. 2) and Aesthetic Experience and Literary Hermeneutics 134 the minnesota review (vol. 3). The latter book originally appeared in German in 1977, and the former contains essays published between 1970 and 1980. The success of these books has helped establish the series as a viable publishing venture with over twenty volumes now being planned. The first essay in Towardan Aesthetic ofReception is "Literary History as a Challenge to Literary Theory," a justly famous pronouncement of the late sixties that outUnes the goals and methods of a future reception aesthetics. Adapting concepts from the hermeneutic tradition, Jauss...