DIABOLIC MUSIC AND FEMALE DYSFUNCTIONALITY: HARDY'S “THE FIDDLER OF THE REELS”

Abstract

Although scholars often praise Hardy's “The Fiddler of the Reels” as a work with “considerable power” (The Cambridge Companion 46), the theme of the workings of the market culture in the story has gone uninvestigated. Set against the backdrop of urban transformations that were enacted by the Great Exhibition and the new mass transportation system, the text dramatizes how male impulses fit into larger questions of acquisitive power and how a narrow preoccupation with dominance creates a messy reality. This study argues that exhibitions (in the material, commercial sense of the term) and exhibitionistic celebrity behavior are aligned in “The Fiddler,” and claims that certain Darwinian and Dionysian elements in the story underwrite this theme. To substantiate this argument, my analysis is attentive to two notions: a general notion of economy and a literary notion of the trickster as expounded by C. G. Jung and Mikhail Bakhtin. Before taking my argument further, I will summarize the plot of “The Fiddler.”