Thomas Hardy’s Elegiac Prose and Poetry

177 Pages·2018·1.489 MB·English

by  Galia Benziman

T H O M A S
H A R D Y ’ S
Elegiac Prose and Poetr y
codes of bereavement
Galia Benziman
Thomas Hardy’s Elegiac Prose and Poetry
Galia Benziman
Thomas Hardy’s
Elegiac Prose and
Poetry
Codes of Bereavement
Galia Benziman
Open University
Ra’anana, Israel
ISBN 978-1-137-50712-9 ISBN 978-1-137-50713-6 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-50713-6
Library of Congress Control Number: 2017964610
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018
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A
cknowledgements
This book initially grew out of my love for Thomas Hardy’s work; the
wish to write it was also inspired by deaths and absences that have contin-
ued and will probably continue to be a personal living presence.
I am grateful to a number of friends and colleagues who either heard or
read portions of the manuscript in recent years. My biggest thanks go to
Yotam, who read every word and whose comments were challenging and
wise. For their friendship and advice I thank Gal Manor, Amy Garnai,
Tammy Amiel-Houser and Yael Shapira.
My colleagues at the Open University and the Hebrew University of
Jerusalem were supportive and helpful. I am indebted to my research assis-
tant Ruben Weiss of the English Department at the Hebrew University for
his fine observations and hard work. I also thank my students in the
“Thomas Hardy” and “English Elegy” classes at the Hebrew University
for their lively input, which contributed to my understanding of Hardy
and of the writing of mourning.
My book evolved from early conference presentations. I thank Adrian
Grafe from Artois University and Jane Thomas from the University of
Hull for their generous and useful feedback on my papers on Hardy’s
“codes of bereavement” delivered in Arras and Dorchester, respectively.
I also owe thanks to Editor Ben Doyle for encouraging me to pursue this
project almost from the start and expand it into a book. Ben, Camille Davies
and the entire Palgrave Macmillan team offered continued professional
help and guidance throughout the process.
v
vi ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Finally, I was fortunate in receiving the Alon Fellowship awarded by the
Israeli Council for Higher Education, as well as several Open University
research grants. This generous financial support facilitated my work, and
for that I am grateful.
c
ontents
1 I ntroduction 1
2 “Hands Behind Hands”: Seeing the Dead 39
3 “Spectres that Grieve”: The Dead Speak 63
4 “Still Corporeally Imminent”: Hardy’s Revenants 77
5 “For She Won’t Know”: Utilising the Dead 107
6 “I Do but the Phantom Retain”: The Mistrust
of Memory 133
Works Cited 161
Index 167
vii
CHAPTER 1
Introduction
As a devout preserver of personal memory, Thomas Hardy (1840–1928)
devotes much of his poetry and fiction to the effect of the past upon the
present. Alongside his evocation of the past in relation to Wessex, commu-
nity and family life, natural scenes, architectural developments and the pri-
vate and social history of individuals, Hardy’s investigation into death and
bereavement is central to his work. Imagining the dead as phantoms deserv-
ing unfaltering attention, he conjures them as inscribed in the landscape,
suggested to the eye and the mind through signifiers such as family vaults,
portraits and statues, corners of nature filled with associations and written
documents such as wills and testaments, epitaphs and posthumous letters.
The prevalence of the dead in his work is the subject of numerous critical
essays. J. Hillis Miller opines that in his poetry and fiction Hardy “brings
the dead to life” and gives them “a permanent existence in an art which is
memory embodied” (Miller 1970: 243). Tim Armstrong calls Hardy “one
of the most ghost-ridden of authors” (Armstrong 2000: 1), while Catherine
Robson refers to him as a “graveyard poet [who] offers up the most grave-
laden poetic oeuvre in English literature” (Robson 2004: 500). DeSales
Harrison goes on to maintain that the dominant figure for Hardy’s art is
“the voice of the absent person, lost or dead” (Harrison 2010: 405).
In discussing his key role in the transition from traditional to modern
elegy, critics underline Hardy’s strong commitment to remembrance of
the dead.1 This pattern notwithstanding, the assertion in this book is that
Hardy’s complex stagings of remembrance are highly ambivalent. Keenly
aware of the inconsistencies and paradoxes of mourning and the inherent
© The Author(s) 2018 1
G. Benziman, Thomas Hardy’s Elegiac Prose and Poetry,
https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-50713-6_1
2 G. BENZIMAN
contradictions in its poetic expression, Hardy revises traditional elegy. His
scepticism regarding the language and poetics of grief undermines the
ethical requirement to remain committed to the dead. Moving away from
the spousal elegies to Emma on which most discussions of Hardy as elegist
focus, it becomes clear how strongly Hardy either justifies or identifies
with guilt-ridden mourners who wish to forget and go on with their lives.
Hardy’s codes of bereavement and especially his depiction of the mourner
as writer are inherently divided. While expressing the deep value of mem-
ory, his work also manifests ongoing scepticism regarding it, suggesting
that memory is often unreliable and narcissistic. This inconsistency pro-
duces a powerful, nuanced revision of basic elegiac conventions.
The omnipresence of the dead in Hardy’s work and the impression that
the dead are still around us shape his representation of loss. In his constant
evocation of the dead, Hardy seems to be a committed spokesman for the
ethical importance of memory. He is universally acknowledged as an
“avowed elegist,” one whose work constitutes “a momentary stay against
amnesia” (Ramazani 1994: 1, 12). Writing at the turn of the century,
Hardy contrasts the pain of bereavement with “the modern hurry-scurry”
of contemporary life “bent on regimented advancement”; he resists mod-
ern society’s attempt “to repress and silence the regressive anarchy of
grief” (ibid.: 12–13). Indeed, Hardy regretted and often satirised the col-
lective forgetfulness typical of his era, and freighted personal grief with
cultural and moral value. Hence, consigning the dead to oblivion is often
shown in his work to be a disrespectful oversight. Hardy critiques not only
personal forgetfulness but also the broader cultural-historical process in
which late-Victorians backed away from what they saw as the extravagant
and persistent grief of the early nineteenth century. This change was
reflected in such divergent doctrines as utilitarianism and psychoanalysis:
two schools of thought that regarded prolonged mourning as respectively
superfluous or pathological. Eschewing the view that we have no moral
obligation to the dead, Hardy suggests that to forget them is to acquiesce
to death and make its power acceptable.2 For Hardy, both the utilitarian
and psychoanalytic critique of protracted mourning were at fault because
the dead are permanently around us and forever in need of our care.
Yet this is only part of the picture. My book explores a different dimen-
sion of Hardy’s poetic commitment to the dead. I read his work as dialec-
tically implicated in the very cultural and psychological “amnesia” he
resists. Hardy is ambivalent towards the issue of remembrance and
forgetting: although he often reacts against the late-Victorian tendency to
INTRODUCTION 3
forget the dead, he is at the same time involved in it himself.3 The wish to
leave the dead behind is sometimes represented in Hardy’s work as natural
and even inevitable. Hence, the moral condemnation of forgetfulness is
doubly undermined. First, Hardy shows nuanced empathy towards the
selfishness and inconstancy of mourners and manifests keen interest in the
creative freedom of their memory to shape imagined realities. Second, his
critique of forgetfulness is diminished both by his view of memory as unre-
liable and by the representation of excessive devotion to the dead as unrea-
sonable, neurotic and harmful. In the following chapters I examine this
pattern, with a particular interest in Hardy’s complicated, guilt-ridden
vision of the writer’s role as elegist and preserver of memory—a vision that
reveals also the writer’s emotional, moral and aesthetic participation in the
collective cultural “amnesia” elegy openly resists.
Based upon a somewhat different corpus than the one usually read in
studies of Hardy’s elegies, this book examines the historical, scientific, psy-
choanalytical and poetic context of traditional and modern conventions of
mourning so as to illuminate Hardy’s unique role in the transition to mod-
ern elegy. In placing Hardy’s poetry and fiction alongside each other, his
unconventional concept of mourning and his suspicion of memory become
more apparent. Hardy’s work collapses long-standing binary distinctions:
remembrance versus forgetting, grief versus consolation, faithfulness to the
dead versus their selfish appropriation by the living, preservation versus
betrayal, all of which have informed poetic representations and theoretical
discussions of mourning for centuries. Yet, in deconstructing these dichot-
omies, Hardy shows these presumed opposites to be inevitably mixed.
Hardy’s textualisation of mourning and the self-reflexive nature of his ele-
giac writing add to his inveterate suspicion of the language of grief. Even his
frequent device of speaking for the dead, for which he is taken to be a com-
mitted elegist—impersonating and giving them a voice—is ambiguous.
Speaking for the dead might be exploitative and self-centred even if it is
intended to convey respect.4 Prosopopeia, or the use of the dead as speakers,
a device Hardy employs in numerous poems, has its parallel in Hardy’s fiction
where characters appear to come back from the dead, e.g. Troy in Far from
the Madding Crowd (1874), Newson in The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886)
and quite a few characters in the short stories. Speaking from the grave serves
to condemn the living for not acting on behalf of the deceased, for usurping
their place and for giving them up far too soon. This motif, while possibly
connoting support of prolonged fidelity, also expresses a desire to possess the
dead, usurp their voice and use them for artistic or emotional purposes.