Reviewed by: Thomas Hardy’s Elegiac Prose and Poetry: Codes of Bereavement by Galia Benziman Eve Sorum (bio) Thomas Hardy’s Elegiac Prose and Poetry: Codes of Bereavement, by Galia Benziman; pp. v + 173. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018, £79.99, $99.99. The terror of the revenant, of the dead reanimated, is on our collective cultural minds recently, whether in Alejandro González Iñárritu’s 2016 epic Western revenge story of The Revenant, or in the Game of Thrones army of the dead, who threaten the living in the final 2019 season. Thomas Hardy, though described by Virginia Woolf in 1926 as an entirely benign “little puffy cheeked cheerful old man, with an atmosphere cheerful & businesslike,” might have predicted this fascination with the undead (The Diary of Virginia Woolf, edited by Anne Olivier Bell, assisted by Andrew McNeillie, vol. 3 [Hogarth Press, 1980], 96). Indeed, “Thomas Hardy: Revenant” could be the title of Galia Benziman’s monograph, Thomas Hardy’s Elegiac Prose and Poetry: Codes of Bereavement. Not only does Benziman write about Hardy’s own obsession with how the dead haunt, inspire, and remain with us, but this book also is one of a number over the past several decades that [End Page 152] returns to Hardy as a touchstone and a source of puzzlement: is he a Victorianist or a modernist; a novelist or a poet; a craftsman or an artist? Perhaps it is his liminality and the difficulty that scholars have in pinning Hardy down that keeps him haunting literary studies. It is precisely this ambiguity that Benziman turns to as the heart of her own exploration of Hardy’s elegies. Elegy is itself a term that challenges definitions: is elegy a form or a mode? Does it perform mourning or resist it? Is it consoling or depressing? Indeed, Benziman convincingly makes the case that the elegy may be the quintessential Hardyian form exactly because it allows the author to operate at the threshold, between periods of time, between life and death, between remembering and forgetting. He is, Benziman argues, always ambivalent about the process of mourning and memory-work in general, even as it also serves as his primary source of literary inspiration. Benziman’s aim in this book is to chart the variety of ways in which Hardy explores the uses and limits of elegies, as well as to examine where the dead reside and emerge (or reemerge) in the oftenhaunted realms of Wessex. Benziman’s method is comprehensive in approach—she examines Hardy’s works in all genres, paying attention to short stories and poems that have not yet received critical attention. This is one of the strengths of the book; it gives us insightful and nuanced readings of a huge range of Hardy’s work, and this will make it useful for students and scholars who are interested in less-often discussed pieces. It can at times lead to a sense of repetitiveness, since Benziman is interested in the accumulation of examples—and there are moments where a more extended reading of just one or two texts might have served her purposes as well—but she declares her interest in covering the writings by Hardy that are not usually examined for their elegiac features, and she fulfills this goal admirably. Readers of Victorian Studies will, I think, find this wide-ranging book of interest even if it is more about Hardy as a modern—sometimes even modernist—writer than as a Victorian. Reading Hardy for his elegiac focus brings out the modern, Benziman argues, especially in his novels, in which his deployment of “complex elegiac qualities” reveals “their important modern aspects” (5). While she refers to some of the familiar touchstone readings of Hardy’s elegies (by Jahan Ramazani and R. Clifton Spargo, for example), and provides equally familiar though necessary background about nineteenth-century mourning practices, one of the more surprising and original moves in her introduction is to pair utilitarianism and psychoanalysis; these two theories of human behavior and motivation do not usually go hand-in-hand in Hardy studies. Benziman argues that we need to see texts like John Stuart Mill’s Utilitarianism (1861) and its prescription to maximize...
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Dec 8, 2023
Saskia Elizabeth Ziolkowski 
Open Access