Thomas Hardy and the Law: Legal Presences in Hardy’s Life and Fiction by William A. Davis, and: Knowledge and Survival in the Novels of Thomas Hardy by Jane Mattisson (review)

Abstract

MLRy 99.4, 2004 1041 most compellingly in the chapter on Arnold in love, which provides a fascinating discussion of the relationship between Arnold's sexuality, poetics, and metaphysical pessimism. The extended attention given to Arnold's demystification of romantic love, and his antipathy to sexual desire and hostility towards women, is powerfully argued with reference to Freud. Although this is Arnold at his less attractive and arguably most misogynistic, in Grob's study it is turned into the most interesting aspect of Arnold's pessimism, revolving around his anxieties about the inauthenticity of speech and his related conception of poetic writing. The modernism that drives Arnold's intellectual courage, for Grob, sets him apart and above his contemporary poets while also (perhaps ironically) providing us with the reason for placing him centrally within the Victorian poetic canon. University of Glasgow Alison Chapman Thomas Hardy and theLaw: Legal Presences in Hardy's Life and Fiction. By William A. Davis. Cranbury, NJ: University of Delaware Press; London: Associated University Presses. 2002. 199 pp. ?32- ISBN 0-87413-798-5. Knowledge and Survival in theNovels of Thomas Hardy. By Jane Mattisson. (Lund Studies in English) Lund: Lund University. 2002. 423 pp. SEK310. ISBN 91974 -0230-3. William A. Davis's careful study of Hardy and the law is the most comprehensive that has appeared on its subject, and is unlikely to be quickly supplanted. With its detailed account of the changing legislative situation of women, and its analysis of some of the most important cases, it is also a book likely to be of use to anyone writing on gender, marriage, and the law in Victorian England. Davis avoids the pitfalls of many works on literature written by legal scholars, in which texts are treated as cases illustrating (or often, deforming) legal principals. His approach is to assume that Hardy was interested in the detail of the law (as his attendances at court suggest), and to look forlegal contexts and in particular well-known cases (like the Dilke divorce trials and the Clithero abduction case of 1891) which inform particular contexts in the novels and stories?and it is remarkable, in this account, just how pervasive the law is in the novels. Davis begins with Hardy's work as a magistrate and juror on the Assizes, and a survey of Hardy's many legal acquaintances; he then moves on to discuss legal is? sues in the novels, ending with a chapter considering more abstractly the evolution of Hardy's relationship to the law. The topic which dominates the book is marriage; or more generally the question of the legal status of relationships; and it makes for a doleful catalogue: rape, seduction, cruelty, desertion, divorce, wife-selling, sham marriage, forcible restraint. Davis does an excellent job of, for example, bringing an understanding of the law of rape in the Victorian period to bear on the notoriously difficult question of Tess's rape or seduction, arguing that Hardy clearly suggests rape before recoding the events, afterthe firstedition, as a seduction (and suggesting a temporal transition from one to the other). Similarly, the discussion of evolving Victorian attitudes as revealed by cases of wife abduction and forcible restraint informs Davis's understanding of the radicalism of Phillotson's release of Sue in Jude the Obscure. Hardy's sympathy with his woman characters, and his determination to rethink marriage (and divorce) within a more libertarian framework, is a keynote of the book, and here he is placed in repeated opposition to his friend, the conservative judge Sir Francis Jeune. It is only in the last chapter that Davis allows himself a little latitude to consider more abstract issues of justice. He suggests that Hardy's attitude to the law evolves 1042 Reviews away from seeing it as providing the possibility of justice, as well as externally con? ceived plot mechanisms. In the later novels humans operate most freely outside the flawed and often oppressive system of law, which can be manipulated by those with power; and there is often the suggestion that the law must be reformed. If there is a limitation to the book, it is that it does not push these ideas very far...