Introduction: Thomas Hardy and the Melodramatic Imagination

Abstract

It is a revealing omission that Peter Brooks, in his widely influential study The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess,² makes not a single, even passing reference to Thomas Hardy. Given Brooks’ critical orientation there are reasonable and possibly predictable explanations for this, but it is still startling to see James, a central figure in the development of modernist psychological realism, receive such prominent treatment in a book on melodrama, while Hardy, an author who throughout his career as a novelist continually employed melodramatic and sensationalist devices, is ignored completely. Yet it is precisely James’ emphasis on the psychology of his characters that makes him so attractive to Brooks, who, as Elaine Hadley notes, “locates melodrama within the psyche of the individual … [For Brooks] the rhetoric of melodrama becomes an aestheticized form of psychological expression and its tropes a series of psychic pressure points that move melodrama out of history and, occasionally, into pathology.”³ Although it would be inaccurate to say that Hardy never uses melodrama as a way of exploring the internal states of his protagonists, it is not his primary mode for employing the form. Instead, evoking the melodramatic and the sensational becomes a way for Hardy to engage with the late-Victorian cultural, economic, and sexual anxieties that are central elements of his plots. Charles Lock, explicitly analyzing the difference between the two authors, suggests that “Hardy’s strategy of avoidance, his determination, at any rate, to do things differently from James, was… achieved… by… an obsession with seeing, with describing, with remaining on the outside,”⁴ and this specular emphasis on the external connects Hardy to the public and political theatrics of stage melodrama in a way that is antithetical to James’ emphasis on the theater of the mind. For this reason more contemporary materialist and historicist analyses of melodrama, which often explicitly define themselves against the perceived “ahistorical” perspective of Brooks, provide important insights into the ways Hardy’s resistance to the realist project embodied itself in his fiction through unsublimated melodramatic elements. That Victorian melodrama, and the kinds of sensation fiction that grew out of and fed back into nineteenth-century dramaturgy, is central to Hardy’s novelistic method needs to be acknowledged more explicitly than most studies of his work have been willing to concede.