Wessexuality: A Theoretical Introduction

Abstract

It is difficult to avoid puns on Wessex and Hardy’s main subject matter; his world, it might be argued, is at least half-comprised of libido. The term ‘Wessexuality’ is a recent neologism, coined in a review of a television adaptation of one of his more outrageous short stories (Black, 1973: 796), but Hardy’s contemporaries made similar puns. A reviewer of The Well-Beloved, for example, complained that ‘of all forms of sex-mania in fiction … the Wessexmania of Mr Thomas Hardy’ was ‘the most unpleasant’ (Millgate, 1982: 382). Victorian critics, who had been delighted by the dainty and enigmatic heroines of Hardy’s early work, expressed outrage and disgust at the more explicit concern with sexual relations in his later novels (Cox, 1970: xxx–xxxvi). For most recent readers, however, much of the interest and pleasure in reading Hardy lies in his treatment of this central area of human experience. Hardy is ‘almost unique in the English nineteenth-century novel’, observes a recent critic, ‘in that he creates women who are sexually exciting’ (Stubbs, 1979: 65). In many ways, of course, his writing remains rooted in the Victorian period. But in some respects at least, as I argue later in this chapter, his treatment of sexuality both illustrates and anticipates not only ‘the necessary conditions of loving’ outlined by Freud, his contemporary, but more recent theories about literature and desire developed by such radical thinkers as Barthes, Foucault and Lacan.