Hardy's dead end genders

Novel: A Forum on Fiction, Fall 1997 by Spilka, Mark

H.M. DALESKI, Thomas Hardy and Paradoxes of Love (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 1997), pp. 222, $34.95.

I'm intrigued by the missing "the" in Daleski's title, before "Paradoxes of Love." It must be intentional. I've known Daleski for over twenty-five years-as a friend and colleague during my visiting semester at Hebrew University in Jerusalem (Spring 1972); as a fellow speaker at several recent Lawrence conferences; and as his host for a lecture at Brown. He seems to me always a careful writer, a forthright speaker, and one of the best close readers in the profession.

What does it mean, then-that missing "the"? It looks as if Daleski wants equal billing for those paradoxes, as if Hardy were so caught up in them as to be defined by them-or perhaps defeated. That seems to be the drift of Daleski's argument as the book begins and ends: "I ... seek to show how a study of the major novels, taken in chronological order, reveals that he in fact drove himself to a dead end. His unremitting pursuit of his central subject [the failures of married love] finally exhausted it" (4). Let's take his careful grammatical elision, then, as a sign of things to come.

The book has still other aims. In the Introduction, for instance, it shows Hardy's modernism, his proleptic affinities with Conrad, Joyce, Woolf, and Lawrence. Like Conrad, who wants only to make us "see" through a series of visual impressions, Hardy wants us to see "impression-pictures" like those "At the Society of British Artists" where "The impressionist school [was] strong" (5-6). His characters focus accordingly upon each other through vivid visual impressions, and his narrators adopt them too: "To see in half or quarter views the whole picture ... is the intuitive power that supplies the would-be writer with the scientific bases for his pursuit" (6).

Hardy's "scientific" desire to make visible things otherwise invisible, "so that the heart and inner meaning" is vividly revealed (6), takes him also in the direction of Joycean epiphanies, by which objects or dramatic moments body forth their "quidditas" or spiritual "whatness." The famous scene in which Jude, from afar, "first sees Christminister," is Daleski's choice illustration of Hardy's epiphanic mode. And Daleski's application of that mode to characterization takes Hardy toward Virginia Woolf's moments of epiphanic being, of changing human character from consistent order to fractured views of "successively various persons" as circumstances dictate (10). This fracturing moves Hardy also toward Lawrence's "allotropic states," toward his preoccupation with changing qualities of being rather than consistent characterizations, as in his own frequently selfdivided protagonists. Indeed, Lawrence would draw demonstrably on Hardy's precedents for symbolic actions and self-divided characters, particularly in Jude the Obscure, where Hardy advances most deeply toward exhausting the possibilities of sexual failure in or out of marriage.

As we have already noted, Daleski's central aim is to demonstrate that over-all exhaustion, to show Hardy as the pre-modern avatar of sexual failures, withdrawals, catastrophic ends. In Far from the Madding Crowd and other early works he modifies that aim with Victorian solutions such as Bathsheba's companionate second marriage to Gabriel Oak. But the modern note is there in Bathsheba's "Diana complex," her attempt to be "sufficent to herself" (76)-an attempt she shares with half a dozen other women characters in Hardy's stories-and half a dozen males. It is that cross-gender sharing of Diana's aims that helps Daleski to get past the hazards of anti-feminism. Perhaps also it explains his early delight in going beyond feminism and other recent movements (notably, deconstructionism) for a new look at Hardy's works. He explains that new look by the Diana complex, whether in male or female characters, as "a sense of self-sufficiency so strong that it inhibits a need or the ability to open the self to a sexual partner." But his use of Diana to expound the inhibitions of both sexes seems an oddly borrowed form of newness, indeed an almost feminist form; and in fact he previously presents his book as "a study in Hardy's treatment of gender in his major fiction," which seems to me a borrowed feminist approach-all the more so when he then "set[s] out to analyze the codes of both masculinity and femininity that are inscribed in [Hardy's] texts and [to] offer a revisionary account of his view of both male and female sexuality" (3).

What is new here, for this former New Critical formalist who in a previous book was seeking "Unities" wherever he could find them, and who now seeks them through unifying "Paradoxes," like those New Critics used to knit together their analyses of modern poems? Well, like many of the rest of us, Daleski has learned much from his erstwhile opponents. In his text, if not in his title, he applies their terms-"gender," "codes," "deconstruction"-to his own post-feminist, post-deconstructionist aims. Of course, he also claims credit for moving beyond still other feminist terms-"essentialism," "sexism"-to a fairer view of Hardy's women as something more than victims, and of Hardy himself as something more than "a crass determinist weighting the scales against them." But he neglects to say that his study owes as much in its procedures to these newly aging trends in criticism as it differs from them in its conclusions. Thus, whatever his unities and humanities, Daleski's Hardy reaches a dead end; he does not yield to public outcries against his sexual paradoxes, as other critics have long believed-no indeed, he exhausts them, he uses them up, and so reaches the ultimate deconstruction, the ultimate paradox: he stops writing novels.