Women and Sexuality in the Novels of Thomas Hardy

Rosemarie Morgan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• Print ISBN: 9780415002684
• eBook ISBN: 9781134931521
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The women in Thomas Hardy's novels appear to have no control over their conduct or their destiny. In this book, Rosemarie Morgan argues a contrary case. Hardy's women struggle, sometimes winning, often losing, but they are not tame objects to be manipulated. Their resistance emerges in their sexuality, a quality which Hardy was often forced to cloak or disguise. Rosemarie Morgan resurrects Hardy's voluptuous heroines and restores to them the physical, sexual reality which Hardy sees as their birthright, but which the male-dominated world they inhabit seeks to deny them, both within and beyond the novel.

1
THE HERESY OF PASSION:
A Pair of Blue Eyes

In the post-Freudian age sexuality inheres in the psyche, or soul, whose guardians are the analyst and sexologist. In terms of professional focus the shift from Victorian physic to twentieth-century psychoanalytic is little more than a minor shift in emphasis from body to mind. A greater shift is evident in the sphere of professional influence. The monopolism exercised by the Victorian medical profession over scientific, biological, moral, ethical and empirical concerns scarcely finds its parallel today in what has become a profession of high specialisation and fundamentally scientific interest. We do not expect, these days, to have moral issues raised by our general practitioner, and emotional or sexual problems seem to belong, not so much to the surgery as to the guidance counsellor’s office.

Mid- to late-Victorian medical theorists held that all serious discussion of female sexuality should properly be confined to the medical journals where, under the heading of pathological disorder, it would be addressed in terms of malfunction. In so far as all aspects of the subject—physical, moral, psychological—were confined to professional investigations into physical and mental abnormalities, a close association inevitably grew up, in the cultural imagination, between the two areas: the malfunctioning organism and female sexuality.¹ And as The Saturday Review (1896) inadvertently reveals in a review of Jude, this close association had become, by the late century, fully assimilated into critical thought. In common with other critics, the Saturday’s ‘Unsigned Reviewer’ looks favourably upon Jude’s sexuality but brings in the word ‘malignant’, more than once, in speaking of Sue’s. The writer goes on to say that,

The respectable public has now got to rejecting books wholly and solely for their recognition of sexuality, however incidental that recognition may be…No novelist, however respectable, can deem himself altogether safe today from a charge of morbidity and unhealthiness.²

It is, of course, ‘morbidity and unhealthiness’ together with ‘malignant’, that reveal this author’s attitudes while, no doubt, reinforcing those of the general reader.

Even as late as 1906, with the publication of Havelock Ellis’s Studies in the Psychology of Sex, which shifted dialogues away from a clinical context, or from scientific discourses, into the oral histories of everyday men and women, members of the reading public were shocked at finding themselves exposed to ‘unhealthy’ issues now expressed in lay terms hitherto obscured by medicalese.

Some decades earlier, in the 1870s, Hardy, too, had felt the impact of this proscription as critics, reflecting the views of the medical theorists, accused him of misrepresenting women by making his heroines too voluptuous. In a mood of bitter reflection upon censorship and prudery he later observed that even the imagination had become the slave of stolid circumstance. It was conditioned, he said, by its surroundings like a river-stream. He was hitting back at his critics whose fidelity to social expedients, as he saw it, prevailed over what he called an honest portrayal of the relations between the sexes. And vitally important to that portrayal, to Hardy’s mind, was the very real fact of female desire, sexual understanding, erotic love, none of which had any connection, as far as he was concerned, with physical or moral infirmity, with mental or moral derangement.

Hardy was not only struck by the manner in which critical fidelity to social expedients enslaved the creative imagination, he was also concerned about the social expediency of enslaving women by denying them a sexual reality. He was clearly on dangerous ground here, and, in every practical sense, had no choice but to disguise his oppositional views while patiently negotiating the proprieties—avoiding ‘unhealthy’ topics as best he may. I do not doubt that he must have found a certain satisfaction in covertly defying Mrs Grundy, in the earlier novels, by endowing his more unconventional heroines with a sexual reality which, in the main, defied and eluded the censor at one and the same time. For ‘patiently negotiating the proprieties’ does not have a very convincing Hardyan ring about it, despite the fact that it would be twenty years or so before he could openly declare himself, in Tess, an opponent of the league of medical theorists, an opponent of the prevailing sexual ethic, and an opponent of the sexual double-standard—his vindication of the voluptuous fallen woman challenging those very Victorian literary conventions that, in absenting or rarefying or mystifying sexuality, reinforced the notion of its unmentionability, its topical ineligibility.

Certain other literary conventions also found Hardy an avid opponent. Codes prescribing sexuality topically ineligible in works of fiction, were matched by equally well-observed conventions governing plot. For example, the marriage-and-happy-ending plot. This may have gained popularity partly because of its intrinsic reformist ethic. Marriage saves all, ensures happiness ever after, but before receiving her prize of husband and marriage, convention dictated that the heroine should be brought to acknowledge her deficiencies, should then become penitent, should then reform. Love and courtship were thus co-terminous with moral reformation, and getting-married-and-living-happily-ever-after provided the most desirable consummation for both character and plot.

Behind this convention lay the principle that moral growth was synonymous with becoming socialised according to prevailing sexual codes and prescribed roles. This was not an equation Hardy, himself, would have made. Both the convention and its underlying principle came under attack in his later novels, and the equivocation that supervenes at certain critical points in his early texts points in the same direction. Where, for example, convention demanded reformation of a headstrong, wilful young woman, the kind of reformation Gabriel Oak, in Far From the Madding Crowd, reserves for Bathsheba whom he would fashion ‘meek and comely’, Hardy confounds the issue by adopting an openly ambivalent stance, or, alternatively, by openly reserving his judgement—clearly very ill-at-ease with such conventions and all that they represented.

I do not mean to suggest that the more dominant Victorian literary conventions inscribed passionless configurations over the outlines of love and romance. For, indeed, sexual mystique did generate a conventional language of love and courtship in the mid- to late-century novel that was not exclusively of the sexually antiseptic lilies-and-lace category. Heroines might flush and glow, for example, or pant and palpitate, and heroes might stalk, or strut, or transfix or thrust, displaying erectile signals of stiffened bearing and stalwart posture (accented imagistically by the ubiquitous cane or uplifting wing-collar). But, typically, these postures and gestures, despite their resemblance to sexual signals and responses, do not lead to sexual encounters. Instead they flow as perceptible indicators towards the inevitable happy ending; not towards erotic sublimation for its own sake but towards marriage for propriety’s sake. What then appears to be sexual passion, embedded in figurative narrative patterns, becomes a means to an end and not an end in itself. It becomes, in effect, a function of plot, to nudge the narrative to its due end, not a function of characterisation revealing depth of emotion, sexual responsiveness and desire.

In a similar way, channelling the erotic life to an end short of actual sexual fulfilment, the maiden possessing sexual knowledge is labelled fallen and denied, thereafter, sexual existence. Again, sexuality becomes a means to an end, not an end in itself. Sexual experience brings no new self-awareness, no enhancement of life, no self-renewal, no epiphanies. In classic Edenic tradition, woman’s fall alone is the meaning. Having fallen, she is effectively cast out, excluded from love relationships. Either she adopts the celibate, penitential or vocational life, as in Gaskell’s Ruth, or, lacking adventurous, self-renewing powers (in clear contrast to her predecessor, Moll Flanders), she limps forlornly into exile—the obvious example, George Eliot’s Hetty Sorrel.

In Candour in English Fiction (1890), Hardy, arguing against Victorian literary conventions, complained that there were only two courses open to him. Either he produced in his characters, ‘the spurious effect of their being in harmony with social forms and ordinances’ or, ‘by leaving them alone to act as they will, he must bring down the thunders of respectability upon his head’. By the 1890s his reputation, and to a lesser extent his nerves, could withstand the thunders; in the early 1870s, neither could. Yet, from the outset he deplored:

the false colouring best expressed by the regulation finish that ‘they married and were happy ever after’…a denouement… indescribably unreal and meretricious, but dear to the Grundyist and subscriber…. In representations of the world, the passions ought to be proportioned as in the world itself, life being a physiological fact.³

There was a third course open to him which he does not mention but which he did adopt. Coventry Patmore was one of the first to distinguish Hardy’s prose as the work of a poet, and indeed, it was by employing the epistemology of the poet that he succeeded in circumnavigating restrictive conventions and the Grundyist, even as early as A Pair of Blue Eyes. This, his third published novel, was well received, and while critical acclaim surpassed all his expectations (Life, p.95), ‘a kind of defiance of conventionality’ in the book did not escape the eagle eye of The Saturday Review. However, and this is the important point, the reviewer was unable to pinpoint the source or manner of the ‘defiance’. And Hardy, in this instance, escaped the thunders.⁴

His first heroine, Cytherea Graye, in Desperate Remedies is not drawn into any form of ‘defiance’. On the contrary, she is a thoroughly orthodox creation. Part Angel—self-effacing, noble, sexless, self-abnegating—and part Gothic personification of sensibility under pressure, she is, in her stereotypical ordinariness rare in the Hardy canon, betraying, I suspect, her author’s sense of her feminine unreality, and hence unrealisableness in his imagination. But he does conceive of alternative possibilities of characterisation. This is suggested by one, very small, Hardyan impertinence tucked unobtrusively into the text where it is said of Cytherea’s rival that,

She had been a girl of that kind which mothers praise as not forward, by way of contrast, when disparaging those warmer ones with whom loving is an end and not a means. (DR, p.148)

This covert approval of loving as an end in itself (the key word is of course ‘warmer’), is too unrelated and understressed to signify in its immediate context as the narrative sweeps on apace; but it does signify in the wider context of Hardy’s commitment to a sexual ethic, which, as his literary reputation improves, emerges with increasing force to re-state, in Tess, at far greater length, the very same principle—that loving should not be a means to an end but an end in itself. But the fact that it arises in Desperate Remedies at all signifies that, even given the most sexless of heroines, Hardy cannot be bound by the moral and literary conventions of the day, nor by the guise of respectability he had adopted in order to secure a market.

It is something of an irony that despite his efforts to conform, this, his first published novel, came in for censure not for small slips into forbidden ways of this kind, nor even for larger slips into closed areas of sensuality, but for falling into error on a simple matter of class distinction. The point of contention was not that his aristocratic Miss Aldclyffe develops a jealous, sensual attachment for the heroine, seeking her in her bed at night begging caresses and kisses. This the women could do with impunity since no male features in these embraces to give them sexual definition. Regarded as the emotional release of maternal or filial wells of feeling they were entirely innocuous; not a single reviewer discerned sensuality or erotic passion. Was Hardy gratified that in this respect at least his presentation of a deeply sensual feminine experience had passed muster? We do not know. But we do know of his shock at being attacked for ‘daring to suppose it possible that an unmarried lady owning an estate could have an illegitimate child’ (Life, p.84). That this should be the most perfidious of indiscretions was stupefying indeed!

To Hardy and his editor, Leslie Stephen, the Grundyists were both unpredictable and baffling: as late as Far From the Madding Crowd, Hardy’s fourth published novel, he was still having trouble keeping one step ahead of them. Aware that the fallen maid of his draft version needed considerable refashioning if her entry into the Victorian drawing-room was not to offend, Hardy transformed the gay-young-woman-about-town (after the manner of ‘Melia in ‘The Ruined Maid’, 1866) into something approaching the sexually-enfeebled fallen-woman stereotype. But despite Leslie Stephen’s half-apologetic advice—he was abashed, he said, by his ‘excessive prudery’—to treat the seduction of Fanny Robin in a ‘gingerly fashion’, (Life, pp.98–9), and despite Hardy’s own attempts at re-fashioning, Fanny Robin failed to conform to type. Part of her nonconformity lies, I think, in her initial rebounding after her ‘fall’, where convention dictated otherwise; and part in her lack of penitence and hot pursuit of the object of her desires; and, no doubt part of it also lies in her getting to the wrong church on time—distinctly a male privilege.

Hardy plays down this particular instance of Grundyist pressure, in the Life, as an amusing example of serial-writing politics. But the reality was harsher. Censorship, he later admitted, ‘paralysed’ him. This may well explain his excessive textual convolutions in A Pair of Blue Eyes, a narrative abounding in conflicting perspectives, contradictory voices and heavily veiled utterances.⁵

Stylistic convolutions also disfigure the text of Desperate Rem edies, but they arise, I think, not from a struggle with non-conformist tendencies, but from a struggle with the genre. Following the rejection of his first book, The Poor Man and the Lady, Hardy was despatched by his publisher to try his hand at a Wilkie Collins-type novel. As his subsequent literary direction indicates he was not in the least predisposed to writing racy detective novels, so it seems perfectly understandable that Desperate Remedies, at its most stylistically awkward moments, tends to live up to the book’s title.

Greatest difficulties arise here with the preliminaries; the result is an opening chapter embarrassingly pitted with falls. First Hardy enumerates a chronology. If the aim is to set a time-scale then it fails. The technique is far too tabular. Simultaneously, various settings are catalogued, presumably to establish location: Hocbridge, Christminster, Bloomsbury, Cambridge, London, Dukery St, and Russell Square—a proliferation of place-names all compressed into the introductory paragraphs on page one! Finally, a dramatis personae is shuffled out from the listings and data which is as ungainly as topography and chronology are lacklustre. Faceless, featureless, functionless, Cytherea Graye, Edward Springrove, Ambrose Graye, Huntway and Bradleigh are trundled out directory fashion—again, all on page one. They defy description, they defy even the imagination. And when the moment arrives for dialogue it is fairly evident that we are in the company of a very uncomfortable Hardy.

Fortunately this awkwardness in effecting an entry to the text does not disable the mechanics of plot once it gets under way, and by the time Hardy has completed Under the Greenwood Tree to embark upon A Pair of Blue Eyes he is no longer at odds with innovate technique. Instead he is at odds with propriety. Why? The answer lies in the arrival of the first in the line of his unconventional, voluptuous heroines, the first of his ‘misrepresentations’ of womanhood.

Elfride Swancourt is no iconic Victorian maiden awaiting self-definition through male endowment: the marriage tie and its award of a man’s name, identity, economic standing and status. Sexual development, exploration and understanding present themselves to Elfride, urged by an increasing awareness of her own psycho-sexual needs, to be of primary importance to her growth to maturity and fulfilment. If, then, we are drawn to her, identify and sympathise with her, this is not so much because she exemplifies oppressed, subordinated womanhood struggling to gain the love of a good man, but because in her daring she puts herself so much at risk, because in her candour she is so self-exposing, because she is strong and weak, brave and fearful, headstrong and vulnerable: she is utterly human and we care for her.

Problems arise for Hardy because he too cares for her. Yet can he be seen to ally himself with her without risking censure? For, according to prevailing views, her moral and intellectual seriousness should be undone by her sexiness; but Elfride is not so undone. Nor is her sexuality treated by Hardy as relative—that is to say merely activated by the male. Nor is it simply a means to an end: getting married and living ...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• ABBREVIATIONS
• INTRODUCTION
• 1: THE HERESY OF PASSION: A PAIR OF BLUE EYES
• 2: SUBVERTING ORTHODOXY: FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD
• 3: ELEMENTAL FORCES: THE RETURN OF THE NATIVE
• 4: PASSIVE VICTIM?: TESS OF THE D’URBERVILLES
• 5: PASSION DENIED: JUDE THE OBSCURE
• 6: CONCLUSION
• APPENDIX: THE INTERNAL DATING OF FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD
• NOTES
• BIBLIOGRAPHY