Abstract
Nearly twenty years ago I published a study titled ‘Fictions in the Criticism of Hardy’s Fiction’ in which I detailed how, often by ignoring relevant textual and other evidence, critics transformed what Hardy had written into something more nearly like an independent fiction.1 In the generation since, Hardy’s novels have been dissected by nearly every instrument of analysis known to modern literary study, and, amid much fine and revealing scholarship, a new crop of remarkably independent critical fictions has appeared. Hence, I think it may once again be useful to call attention to some of the more creatively imaginative of them, and to consider what influences on contemporary critical practice brought them about. Given, however, the extraordinary amount of scholarship on Hardy’s novels produced in the last twenty years, I will this time limit my illustrations to those drawn from writings on Tess of the d’Urbervilles published or reprinted between 1980 and 1995.
Literary criticism consists of ‘manhandling the text, interrupting it’.
Roland Barthes
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Notes
Robert Schweik, ‘Fictions in the Criticism of Hardy’s Fiction’, English Literature in Transition, 20 (1977) 204–9.
On considerations of authorial intention in the interpretation of texts, see, for example, Alexander Nehamas, ‘The Postulated Author: Critical Monism as a Regulative Ideal’, Critical Inquiry, 8 (Autumn 1981) 133–49.
For analyses of the social nature of literary texts and the function of readers in determining textual meanings see, among others, Claire Badaracco, ‘The Editor and the Question of Value: Proposal’, Text, 1 (1984) 41–3
Colin Falck, Myth, Truth and Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989)
Josephine Guy and Ian Small, Politics and Value in English Studies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993)
David Novitz, ‘The Integrity of Aesthetics’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 48 (1990) 9–20
and Stein Haugom Olsen, The End of Literary Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987)
Thomas Hardy, Tess of the d’Urbervilles, ed. Juliet Grindle and Simon Gatrell (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983) ch. 59.
Ian Gregor, ‘Contrary Imaginings: Thomas Hardy and Religion’, in The Interpretation of Belief: Coleridge, Schleiermacher and Romanticism, ed. David Jasper (London: Macmillan Press, 1986) p. 206.
Karen Scherzinger, ‘The Problem of the Pure Woman: South African Pastoralism and Female Rites of Passage’, Unisa English Studies, 29: 2 (September 1991) p. 30.
‘The Profitable Reading of Fiction’, in Thomas Hardy’s Personal Writings, ed. Harold Orel (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1966; London: Macmillan, 1967) p. 112.
For summaries of these evidences, see Kristin Brady, ‘Tess and Alec: Rape or Seduction?’, in Thomas Hardy Annual No. 4, ed. Norman Page (London: Macmillan, 1986) pp. 127–47
and Marjorie Garson, Hardy’s Fables of Integrity: Woman, Body, Text (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991) p. 138
David Lodge, ‘Tess, Nature, and the Voices of Hardy’, in The Language of Fiction (London: Routledge, 1966) pp. 164–88.
Among the sources cited by modern commentators on Tess are Mikhaïl Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Michael Holquist and Caryl Emerson (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981)
Peter Brooks, Reading for Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1984)
Ross Chambers, ‘“Narrative” and “Textual” Functions (with an Example from La Fontaine)’, in Reading Narrative: Form, Ethics, Ideology, ed. James Phelan (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1989) pp. 27–39
Seymour Chatman, Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978)
Gérard Genette, Narrative Discourse, trans. Jane E. Lewin (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1980)
Paul Ricoeur, ‘Narrative Time’, in On Narrative, ed. W. J. T. Mitchell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981)
Franz K. Stanzel, Theorie des Erzählens (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1979)
and Susan Sniader Lanser, The Narrative Act: Point of View of Prose Fiction (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981)
See, for example, Jakob Lothe, ‘Hardy’s Authorial Narrative Methods in Tess of the d’Urbervilles’, in The Nineteenth-Century British Novel, ed. Jeremy Hawthorn (Baltimore: Arnold, 1986) pp. 157–70
Adena Rosmarin, ‘The Narrativity of Interpretive History’, in Reading Narrative: Form, Ethics, Ideology, ed. James Phelan (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1989) pp. 12–26
and Margaret R. Higonnet, ‘Tess and the Problem of Voice’, in The Sense of Sex: Feminist Perspectives on Hardy, ed. Margaret R. Higonnet (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993) pp. 14–31
For evidences of Hardy’s diverse narrative attitudes revealed by the textual history of Tess, see Simon Gatrell’s ‘Introduction’ to Tess of the d’Urbervilles, The World’s Classics Edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988) pp. xvii–xxiv.
Peter Widdowson, ‘“Moments of Vision”: Postmodernising Tess of the d’Urbervilles; or, Tess of the d’Urbervilles Faithfully Presented by Peter Widdowson’, in New Perspectives on Thomas Hardy, ed. Charles P. C. Pettit (London: Macmillan Press, 1994) p. 96.
Patricia Ingham, Thomas Hardy, Feminist Readings (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1989) p. 73.
Ellen Rooney, ‘“A Little More than Persuading”: Tess and the Subject of Sexual Violence’, in Rape and Representation, ed. Lynn A. Higgins and Brenda R. Silver (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991) p. 104.
Janet Freeman, ‘Ways of Looking at Tess’, Studies in Philology, 79:3 (Summer 1982) 322–3.
For citations of many examples, see Sheila Berger, Thomas Hardy and Visual Structures: Framing, Disruption, Process (New York: New York University Press, 1990).
See Robert Davis, Lacan and Narration: The Psychoanalytic Difference in Narrative Theory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983).
Lacan’s ideas, for example, are explicitly one of the bases of T. R. Wright’s Hardy and the Erotic (Basingstoke: Macmillan Press; New York: St Martin’s Press, 1989).
Kaja Silverman, ‘History, Figuration and Female Subjectivity in Tess of the d’Urbervilles’, Novel: A Forum on Fiction, 18:1 (Fall 1984) p. 10.
Kristin Brady, ‘Tess and Alec: Rape or Seduction?’, Thomas Hardy Annual No. 4, ed. Norman Page (London: Macmillan, 1986) p. 129.
Judith Mitchell, ‘Hardy’s Female Reader’, in The Sense of Sex: Feminist Perspectives on Hardy, ed. Margaret R. Higonnet (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993) p. 178.
Penny Boumelha, Thomas Hardy and Women: Sexual Ideology and Narrative Form (Sussex: Harvester Press, 1982) p. 120.
James Kincaid, ‘“You Did Not Come”: Absence, Death and Eroticism in Tess’, in Sex and Death in Victorian Literature, ed. Regina Barreca (Basingstoke: Macmillan Press; Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990) p. 14.
See Roland Barthes, ‘The Death of the Author’, in Image-Music-Text, trans. and ed. Stephen Heath (London: Fontana, 1977) pp. 142–8
and Michel Foucault, ‘What Is an Author?’, in Textual Strategies: Perspectives in Post-structuralist Criticism, trans. and ed. Josue Harari (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1979) pp. 141–60
For an analysis of this tendency in modern criticism, see Richard Levin, ‘The Poetics and Politics of Bardicide’, PMLA, 105 1990) 491–504.
Reuben J. Ellis, ‘Joan Durbeyfield Writes to Margaret Saville: An Intermediary Reader in Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles’, Colby Library Quarterly, 24:241 (March 1988) 15.
John Goode, ‘The Offensive Truth: Tess of the d’Urbervilles’, in Tess of the d’Urbervilles / Thomas Hardy, ed. Peter Widdowson, New Casebooks (Basingstoke: Macmillan Press; New York: St Martin’s Press, 1993) pp. 199, 186–7.
John B. Humma, ‘Language and Disguise: The Imagery of Nature and Sex in Tess’, South Atlantic Review, 54:4 (November 1989) 66.
James Gibson (ed.), Tess of the d’Urbervilles, Everyman Library (London: J. M. Dent, 1984) p. 401.
Jean Jacques Lecercle, ‘The Violence of Style in Tess of the d’Urbervilles’, in Tess of the d’Urbervilles / Thomas Hardy, ed. Peter Widdowson, New Casebooks (Basingstoke: Macmillan Press; New York: St Martin’s Press, 1993) pp. 148–9.
Lecercle’s reference is to Gilles Deleuze and F. Guattari’s Mille Plateaux (Paris, 1980).
Rosemarie Morgan, ‘Passive Victim?: Tess of the d’Urbervilles’, The Thomas Hardy Journal, 5:1 (January 1989) 32.
Dale Kramer, Thomas Hardy: Tess of the d’Urbervilles (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991) p. 51.
See, for example, Graham Handley, Thomas Hardy: Tess of the d’Urbervilles, Penguin Critical Studies (London: Penguin Books, 1991) pp. 43–4.
Elizabeth Ermarth, ‘Fictional Consensus and Female Casualties’, in The Representation of Women in Fiction, ed. Carolyn G. Heilbrun (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983) p. 13.
George Wotton, Thomas Hardy: Towards a Materialist Criticism (Totowa: Barnes & Noble; Goldenbridge: Gill and Macmillan, 1985) p. 91.
Joe Fisher, The Hidden Hardy (Basingstoke: Macmillan Academic and Professional, 1992) p. 164.
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© 1998 Robert C. Schweik
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Schweik, R. (1998). Less than Faithfully Presented: Fictions in Modern Commentaries on Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles. In: Pettit, C.P.C. (eds) Reading Thomas Hardy. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-26657-9_2
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