Thomas Hardy, Monism, and the Carnival Tradition: The One and Many in 'The Dynasts' by G. Glen Wickens (review)

Abstract

MLR, 99.3, 2004 757 Coleridge's work on symbol and allegory and through a specifically female response to the repressions of patriarchal religion that deny the validity of women's experience and bodies. Rossetti develops an active theology that insists on its accessibility and relevance to the detail of women's everyday life. Furthermore?and this the book's most significant achievement?this argument challenges the dominant view that Ros? setti's religion was based on renunciation and repression, initiated in accounts by William Michael Rossetti of his sister as 'a fountain sealed'. Rossetti's theology is, on the contrary, nothing short of a radical feminist theology, and Palazzo makes nu? merous parallels to the contemporary feminist theologians such as Mary Daly who, she argues, were prefigured by Rossetti. Such interconnections are, unfortunately, left hanging as associations and similarities rather than historical and intellectual trajectories (rather surprising in a study otherwise sensitive to the complexities of analogy). Furthermore, the contradictory attitude of Rossetti to Victorian feminism, exemplified by her famous letters to Augusta Webster refusing to support her petition for women's suffrage, is not sufficientlyunravelled. Although a strong and eloquent case is made for Rossetti's woman-centred subversions of masculinist theology, the claim that it is modern and radically feminist is not wholly convincing. The analysis of Rossetti's prose is at its best when mapping connections to contem? porary theology and culture, in particular her relationship with the Revds Dodsworth, Burrows, and Littledale, the Langham Place Circle, and her challenges and revisions to Tractarianism. The study begins with two chapters that are mostly concerned with Rossetti's poetry prior to her firstreligious prose volume, and attempts to read her emerging theology through some paradigmatic texts such as 'Goblin Market', 'The Prince's Progress', and Maude. The following chapters are exclusively devoted to a chronological and detailed study of the devotional prose. Although Palazzo at times suggests a relationship between Rossetti's aesthetics and religion, and notes her poetic reading of Scripture, the sense of Rossetti's development into a Victorian sage writer does too often lose sight of her status as a woman poet, thus sidestepping a key issue for many other commentators on Rossetti, from Virginia Woolf to Angela Leighton, who question the tensions between poetic vocation and religion. There is a missed opportunity here to develop the excellent iftruncated discussion of Rossetti's analysis of language and symbol (in Chapters 4 and 5) into a wider account of her poetic writing and especially her theological poetics. University of Glasgow Alison Chapman Thomas Hardy, Monism, and the Carnival Tradition: The One and Many in cThe Dynasts '. By G. Glen Wickens. Toronto, Buffalo, NY, and London: University of Toronto Press. 2002. xix + 255pp. $60; ?40. ISBN 0-8020-4864-1. G. Glen Wickens's aim in writing this book is 'not to restore the "great" reputation of The Dynasts, but rather to bring it up close enough to be read and appreciated within the carnival tradition' (p. xix). Bakhtin and Hardy are placed in a mutually beneficial relationship here although the benefits Hardy's last 'major' work gains from Bakhtin are fargreater than the other way around. While Wickens suggests that Bakhtin functions as an 'antidote' to previous and predominantly pessimistic read? ings of The Dynasts, Hardy's 'longest novel' challenges and supplements Bakhtin's apparent disregard forthe dangers of carnivalistic violence. Wickens's argument rests on recasting The Dynasts as 'a novel in the carnival and menippean tradition' rather than 'a failed epic or drama' (p. 217) and relocating it in the 'serio-comical' rather than the pessimistic tradition (p. xi). In addition he seeks to locate The Dynasts in the context of the monistic debate which forms the 'dialogizing background of the 758 Reviews Overworld' (p. xii). The contributions of Schopenhauer, Hartmann, Huxley, Spencer, and Carlyle to the controversy surrounding 'the one and the many' join with those of lesser and previously disregarded minor luminaries such as Armitage, Ward, Tyndall, Fiske, and Drummond in such a way as to foreground the debate without effacing its controversies and contradictions. For Wickens, Bakhtin and Hardy are linked by their interest in the relationship between elite culture...