BOOK REVIEW: Tess O'Toole.GENEALOGY AND FICTION IN HARDY: FAMILY LINEAGE AND NARRATIVE LINES.London: Macmillan; New York: St. Martin's Press, 1997.

Abstract

Reviewed by: Genealogy and Fiction in Hardy: Family Lineage and Narrative Lines Angelique Richardson (bio) Genealogy and Fiction in Hardy: Family Lineage and Narrative Lines, by Tess O’Toole; pp. ix + 195. London: Macmillan; New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997, £40.00, $55.00. Hardy was clearly and self-confessedly taken with the drama of family history. His own story was susceptible to a retelling that was as short as it was dramatic: “and so we go, down, down, down” (The Early Life of Thomas Hardy [1928] 281). He began his (auto)biography, ghostwritten under the name of his second wife, with a lengthy and elaborate account of his pedigree, going back on the maternal side to the reign of Charles I and earlier, and on the paternal side to the le Hardy’s in the fifteenth century, and establishing that “they all had the characteristics of an old family of spent social energies” (5). The professed subject of Tess O’Toole’s study—Hardy, family lineage, and narrative lines— thus promises rich dividends. Central to Genealogy and Fiction, which draws heavily on the work of D. A. Miller, J. Hillis Miller, and Hayden White, is the premise that personal histories are determined by stories; fictions intervene in genealogical patterns. Spun out for the duration of the book, this premise offers some novel insights along the way; it suggests, for example, that Paula from A Laodicean (1881) and the eponymous Ethelberta have been neglected by critics largely because they elude the conventions of gender, playing irreverently with, rather than being played upon by, family history. The reading of The Hand of Ethelberta (1876), drawing on Peter Widdowson’s work, is one of the book’s strengths, and illustrates well the thesis that the power of fiction can exceed the power of genealogy: Ethelberta’s hand is stronger than the aristocrat’s loins. Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891) is also illuminated by the study’s analytical framework. Arguing that the genealogical reading of Tess’s history which the novel seems to promote is undercut by a reading of her history in socioeconomic terms, O’Toole finds in the novel two plots: the romantic, underpinned by a sentimental attachment to an outmoded aristocracy, and an alternative realist or naturalist plot in which Tess’s story is that of a young woman of the exploited working class. However, these two stories, with their tellingly distinct registers, share much common ground. A consideration of the discourses of degeneration prevalent in late-nineteenth-century Britain, so appealing to Hardy’s imagination (William Greenslade’s Degeneration, Culture and the Novel [1994] would have been useful here), would have allowed O’Toole to explore links between them. As “the belated seedling of an effete aristocracy” (ch. 35), Tess was just as likely to be hard up as she was as an ur-child of nature: the aristocracy was losing economic as well as biological capital (indeed Paula Power’s wealthy industrialist father has to bail out the impoverished, aristocratic De Stanceys). Likewise, O’Toole’s assertion that the childlessness of Hardy’s protagonists reflects his privileging of narrative production over biological reproduction ignores his engagement with biological discourses. While it is true that the characters are survived only by their stories, these stories are, in part, stories about reproductive failure, a hot topic at the time. Biology cannot be excised from family history as easily as O’Toole would like. She is consistently uninterested in the practicalities that give birth to genealogy. For example, her study of Hardy’s short story, “An Imaginative Woman” (1894), in which a woman’s child resembles her imaginary lover, would have profited from comparison with his poem, “A Practical Woman” (published 1928), which gives the other side of the equation: a woman opts for a practical eugenic arrangement (“I found a father at last who’d suit / The purpose in my head / And used him till he’d done his job” [lines 17–19]). [End Page 371] It is the drama of family history, not the biology, that interests O’Toole; the closest she gets to biology is seeing fiction as its “metaphorical enactment.” Thus, she shores up tropes...