Ambivalence in Hardy: A Study of His Attitude to Women by Shanta Dutta

Abstract

442 Reviews and agonizing social problem does not justify an abandonment of the aesthetics of the critical text, and a commitment to historical readings necessitates fundamental historical accuracies. University of Leeds Denis Flannery Ambivalence in Hardy: A Study of his Attitude to Women. By Shanta Dutta. Basingstoke : Macmillan; New York: St Martin's Press. 2000. xi + 256 pp. ?42.50. ISBN 0-333-74486-1. There is a rather depressing photograph of Thomas Hardy, in the last year of his life, crossing the muddy, disturbed ground of a building site, as he goes to lay the foundation stone of the newly located Dorchester Grammar School. On a cold and windy July day in 1927 he is followed over the mud by a procession of dignitaries dressed variously in mayoral chains, hats, and church cassocks. George Meredith and Thomas Hardy were among the last of the eminent literary Victorians to survive well into the twentieth century, and as such they were bound to be lionized. In 1927 Hardy was an old man, accustomed by at least thirty years of public adulation to the tributes and duties of the literary lion?the society dinners, publicly subscribed letters of congratulation , pleas from aspiring writers, interviews, and teas at Max Gate. By devoting well over half her book to the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century years of Hardy's life and work, and by taking a highly biographical approach to his writings throughout, Shanta Dutta's book unknowingly reveals more about the terrible aridity of the lionized life than about the well-worn subject of Hardy's 'attitude to women'. Like one of the many young writers who sought an audience with Hardy at Max Gate, Dutta's book is too concerned with Hardy as personality, or even as celebrity. This fascination with his lifeand with abundant biographical conjecture leads to blind spots in the critical writing. On heredity mjude, for example, Dutta states, '[Hardy] was surely not unaware of the role of heredity in determining character and action'?a fairlymajor understatement which oddly ignores the factthat Hardy's near-obsession with generational repetition has been long established by works such as Gillian Beer's Darwin's Plots or very directly by his own statements on his early reading of Darwin and poems such as 'The Pedigree' and 'Heredity'. Part of the problem is that Dutta engages with works in a critical fieldwhich are focused entirely on Hardy?or, in other words, with monographs with 'Hardy' in the title?and this means that works such as Beer's, or Keith Snell's Annals of the Labouring Poor, which contain important chapters on Hardy's works in their social and historical context, are ignored. There is close and well-researched attention to Hardy's revisions, especially to The Return of the Native, but too often the analysis peters out into biographical speculation : Hardy's 'mother-obsession', guilt over 'filial betrayal', depiction of his sister or past loves, forexample. The extent to which Dutta is fascinated by speculations about Hardy the man is evident in her frequent refusal to distinguish between author and narrator, and in her quotations from two novels 'about' Hardy, Howard Jacobson's Peeping Tom (1984) and Emma Tennant's Tess (1993). While the damning judgements of what is deemed Hardy's Victorian patriarchy in these novels may say something of the changing currents in popular response to Hardy, Dutta does not address this issue, but lets quotations from these novels stand in as critical responses in the last pages of her introductory chapter on 'the critics' debate', and on other occasions in her study. While she acknowledges that Jacobson and Tennant are 'extreme' in theirjudgement, their characters are responding to a late twentieth-century idea of Hardy, devoid of his cultural and historical context; their often simplistic reactions have no place in a critical work. There are times also when it becomes necessary for the critic herself to MLRy 98.2, 2003 443 raise her own consciousness about the social and historical context from which she herself is writing: in her discussion of the deaths of the children in Jude the Obscure, Dutta asserts that 'the tragedy of a child's...