Hardy’s Use of Allusion PDF
Preview Hardy’s Use of Allusion
HARDY'S USE OF ALLUSION Also by Palgrave Macmillan EDITH WHARTON AND KATE CHOPIN: A Reference Guide WHAT MANNER OF WOMAN: Essays on English and American Life and Literature (editor) HARDY'S USE OF ALLUSION Marlene Springer © Marlene Springer 1983 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1983 978-0-333-33395-2 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without permission First published 1983 by THE MACMILLAN PRESS LTD London and Basingstoke Companies and representatives throughout the world ISBN 978-1-349-06391-8 ISBN 978-1-349-06389-5 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-06389-5 Typeset in Great Brz"tain by Scarborough Typesetting Services For Haskell, Ann, and Rebecca Contents Acknowledgements Vlll Introductory Textual Note IX 1 Style and Thomas Hardy 1 2 Three Experiments in Form 18 3 The Dimensions of Success and Failure 53 4 The Rustic Chorus 82 5 Stylistic Maturity in The Return of the Native 98 6 Aftercourses: Tess of the d'Urbervilles and jude the Obscure 121 List ofA bbreviations Used in the Notes and Bibliography 175 Notes and References 176 Bibliography 189 Index 196 vii Acknowledgements I should like to thank Professors Allan Hollingsworth, Paul Zietlow, Peter Casagrande and the late J. 0. Bailey for their care ful reading and useful suggestions during the development of the manuscript, as well as Professor Harold Orel for his valuable advice during its last stages. The librarians of the Berg Collection in the New York Public Library, the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, England, the British Library and the Dorset County Museum (especially Mr R. N. R. Peers) were helpful during my study of Hardy's manuscripts. I am also indebted to the University of Missouri-Kansas City Research Council for its financial support of my manuscript work in England. And finally my deepest thanks to Haskell Springer for his undeviating support, fine critical suggestions and willingness to share his life with Thomas Hardy. Part of Chapter 2 of this book has appeared in the Colby Library Quarterly, and Chapter 5 in Inscape. viii Introductory Textual Note All references, unless otherwise stated, are to the New Wessex Edition, paperback printing (London, Macmillan), based on the text of 1912 Wessex Edition. Since Hardy did revise parts of the earlier novels for his Wessex Edition, whenever there is a question of stylistic development and evidence that he revised his allusions to accord with a new concept of the novel, a comparison between the manuscript or the first edition, depending on which is extant, and the 1912 Wessex, the last authorised version, is included.1 Such revisions fall within the scope of this study of Hardy's allusive technique in that they support the thesis that he increasingly im proved his literary talents, and that his allusive method was stylistically intentional. ix 1 Style and Thomas Hardy Even a cursory survey of style in major Victorian writers reveals that, in contrast to the eighteenth century, the nineteenth is remarkable for its diversity: Carlyle is recognised for involved negatives, Pater his affectation, Ruskin his imperatives, Eliot her didacticism and detachment, Dickens his labelling, Scott his legal istic distance and Hardy for his study of the London Times. Even within this diversity, however, many fiction writers of the period share a common stylistic trait - the abundant use of literary allu sions. George Eliot even felt called to warn against them in a letter of 22 April 1873: 'As to quotations, please - please to be very moderate, whether they come from Shakespeare or any other ser vant of the Muses. A quotation often makes a fine summit to a climax. . . . But I hate a style speckled with quotations.' Hated or not, she used them herself, speckling her fiction, her essays, even her letters with literary references. Hardy was decidedly of his age in this respect in that he out-alluded virtually every allusionist - not only in substance, but in skill as well. Hardy's style in general has long been the subject of debate. Even so fine a novel as Far From the Madding Crowd was attacked by the Saturday Review (9 January 1875, p. 57) for its 'clumsy and inelegant metaphors', and Hardy was admonished that 'eccen tricities of style are not characteristic of genius, nor of original thinking'. More recently Robert Heilman, while admitting that Hardy's style has compensatory virtues, lists his rhetorical faults as 'disorderly heaps of modifiers, relative clauses with unclear antecedents, upsidedown when clauses, excess of participial con structions, awkward absolute and gerund construction, dangling modifiers of various kinds, faulty parallelism, clumsy passives, separation of related elements, confused pronoun references'. 1 Critics and readers alike, then, concede that Hardy, like Shakes peare, was sometimes cavalier about grammar. However, most critics now agree that Hardy's occasional lapses in form are far outweighed by his more comprehensive stylistic
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