Reading Hardy's Landscapes, and: The Achievement of Thomas Hardy, and: Hardy's Early Poetry: Romanticism Through a "Dark Bilberry Eye" (review)

Abstract

These recent essays and book-length studies represent ways of reading which range from the purely appreciative to the scholarly; in doing so they demonstrate that Thomas Hardy continues to draw very different sorts of readers from within the academic world. Michael Irwin, the author of Picturing: Description and Illusion in the Nineteenth-Century Novel (1979), moves in his latest book beyond a perspectival view of scenery and "inert settings" (15) to a consideration of landscape as ambient space. Looking at visual and acoustic details in Hardy's fiction and poetry, Irwin enlists individual scenes to educe the "mutual dependency between background and characters" (ix), which is, he argues, essential to the meaning of the texts. Irwin begins with a consideration of "small things" (insects and [End Page 547] noises) and lines up a series of passages from the fiction, and, less often, the poems, to show their deployment of sensory features. He uses this same method in later chapters when he moves to the encompassing idea of landscape as a realm of reciprocal movements. Organized in this way, Reading Hardy's Landscapes works very well as an unfolding argument. Irwin focuses on dynamic as opposed to pictorial spaces, and he detects in them some of the same interpretive possibilities he sees in the landscapes of John Constable (The Leaping Horse [1824] in particular), and in a modern still-life painting by Giorgio Morandi, as well as in a late-nineteenth-century sculpture by Medardo Rosso. Rosso sculpts a face as though it is both emerging from and receding into the background, and Morandi, in his Natura Morta (1963), conveys the fluidity of space in which very different objects appear to resemble each other. In this company, Hardy's technique appears both Victorian and modern; the effects of his description range from the realistic and microscopic to the surreal. Metaphors in both poems and novels equate objects the way Morandi's images do; they show, in other words, that two separate entities are "acted on by the same forces" (81). "The scenes displayed are delusive" and "evanescent, reflecting the dubieties and complexities of our habitual ways of seeing and conceptualizing" (149).