Hardy’s Study of the Human Brain

IN THIS THOUGHTFULLY RESEARCHED and well-crafted study, Suzanne Keen reads literary and textual evidence found in Hardy’s novels, verse, notebooks and auto/biographies against relevant contemporary studies of the human mind/brain. Drawing upon accounts of nineteenth-century philosophy and physiology of mind as well as emergent investigations of psychology and emotion, she is careful to distinguish between those whose ideas can be shown to have been known by Hardy, such as Henry Maudsley, Herbert Spencer, G. H. Lewes, F. W. H. Myers, T. H. Huxley, Darwin and many lesser-known others, and those whose work cannot, most notably, Freud. This single scholarly choice enables her to provide greater clarity of analysis throughout her discussion of what Hardy knew about the mind/brain at various stages of his life and how he used that understanding to engage particular intellectual questions and literary problems in his work. Unlike previous attempts by other scholars who have examined Victorian literature, psychology and brain science, Keen’s work largely avoids the awkwardness of praising Hardy for his “anticipation” of future psychological or neuroscientific developments, a still-too-common pitfall of many “literature and science” studies.

In the substantial introduction and the first of the volume’s five main chapters, “Psychological Hardy,” Keen recognizes the importance of identifying and evaluating how Hardy built his own brain’s understanding of the human mind/brain through his broad and eclectic autodidactic reading. Relying (as so many of us so gratefully do) upon Lennart A. Björk’s editions of Hardy’s Literary Notebooks, as well as upon ideas presented in his monograph, Psychological Vision and Social Criticism in the Novels of Thomas Hardy (1987), she retraces Hardy’s reading in the subject from youth to old age through his numerous references to relevant newspaper articles, periodical essays and contemporary texts. Actively curious, open-minded, intrepid, he read widely across works of philosophy, philosophy of mind, psychology, theories of emotion and cognition, studies of mind-body, behavior and heredity. Keen does a good job explaining the availability of materials intended primarily for general Victorian readers as well as those texts that likely targeted more specialized scientific and medical audiences. She notes that Hardy might well have had access to both types of journals through the library at the British Museum or club libraries, such as that of The Athenaeum (where he was a member from 1891 on). She focuses specific attention on Hardy’s reading of John Stuart Mill, Fourier and Comte, Lewes, Huxley and Spencer and the broadening of intellectual outlook afforded him through various clubs’ social life. Although more difficult to document, Keen is quite right to value the possible influence upon Hardy of direct conversations and exchange with other club members who were pondering similar questions from different perspectives, such as the medical psychiatrist James Crichton Browne and the neurologist Henry Head. Viewing Hardy as an early adaptor of Darwin, she also usefully explicates his reading of “monists and materialists,” Darwinian psychologists, and those interested in the relationship of the conscious to unconscious, psychical research, human perception and emotion, including such figures as W. K. Clifford, Théodule Ribot, Havelock Ellis, F. W. H. Myers, William James, Bergson, and Henry Maudsley.

In chapter two, “The Minds of Hardy’s Characters,” Keen takes up the complex challenge of providing current literary theoretical—primarily narratological—contexts for her analysis of Hardy’s fictional representations of mental processes such as analytical thought, emotion, inference, formation of attitudes, et cetera. Quite cogently, she breaks with the past literary critical “habit of interpreting a progressive development in formal strategies” of narration to offer an appreciative and descriptive engagement with the diverse approaches Hardy used, including narrated monologue (free indirect discourse), quoted monologue, thought report (also known as psycho-narration), externalized narration, and intermental or communal thought. She then provides readings of how Hardy utilized these techniques to represent the individual human psychology of his characters and their interpersonal and social...