Hardy's dead end genders

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

Meanwhile, Daleski turns his new look on Hardy's heroines: they all possess free will, and since they always use it to make the wrong choices, they all prove to be accountable for their chosen fates! In Far from the Madding Crowd, for instance, Bathsheba is not altogether victimized by her rash marriage to Sergeant Troy; it is her own inhibiting or cool sexuality, rather, that throws him off as it contributes to his wanderlust. Admittedly, Hardy shows this cooling process obliquely rather than forthrightly; but he shows it nonetheless convincingly-as Daleski takes great pains to prove. There may be some latent anti-feminism, of course, some blaming of the supposed "victim," in Daleski's relentless attempt to find such chosen coolness in Bathsheba and her sisters in half a dozen tales, "transcending all essentialism" (4); but his similar relentlessness with male versions of inhibiting choices (including Hardy's) gets him off the hook.

These gender similarities raise a puzzling question, nonetheless, as to the difference or differences between male and female sexual codes. There are two famous sensual heroines, for instance, in Hardy's tales: Tess and Arabella; but Tess is complicated by her adoration of Angel Clare, her ethereal persuasions; indeed she is all but denatured by them, and murders Alec D'Urberville, her sensual awakener, when he reverts from a shortlived religious conversion to sensual type. Arabella remains more consistent; but her passions quickly tire in marriage, and she leaves Jude in accord with Hardy's belief that, hot or cold, sexuality fails to sustain marriage. It seems safe to say, however, that most of his heroines are "cool": Bathsheba, the fickle Elfride in A Pair of Blue Eyes, the quickly cooling if romantically inflammable Eustacia Vye in Return of the Native, the oddly unmovable Grace Melbury in The Woodlanders, and the altogether maddening Sue Bridehead in Jude the Obscure.

The number of male Dianas in Hardy's fiction is just as large and just as varied; but with men Hardy is given to pairing his diffident heroes with sensual rivals for Diana's hand, as with Troy and Boldwood or Gabriel Oak in Far from the Madding Crowd, Alec D'Urberville and Angel Care in Tess, Clym Yeobright and Damon Wildeve in Return of the Native, or Edred Fitzpiers and Giles Winterbourne in The Woodlanders. Only in Jude the Obscure does he present a diffident male-Jude himself-with the opposing choice of sensual Arabella and ice-cool Sue. As Daleski points out, Hardy himself was a diffident lover, drawn toward bolder sensual charmers like his father as types he wished to emulatethough he always casts them as arrogant libertines in his fictions. Similarly his most sensual heroine-Arabella-is also his grossest woman character.

Such patterns seem to me more Victorian than modern, as if Hardy were an unusually vocal and moral sexologist, hellbent on exposing the sexual failures of his age. Of course, his age refused to cooperate. More fastidious Victorians became even more vocal and clamored against Tess and Jude, and the exhausted Hardy let them have the final say. So perhaps we must take him as modern, if only by default, in his moral and sexual vocalism, in his arrival at the dead end of his otherwise endless variations on failed marriages. He is in this respect a wastelander before his time, a T.S. Eliot without incipient faith, a Lawrence without positive sexual solutions for the ills of modern marriage, and he shares with such modern heirs the shock value of his sexual pronouncements. There are moments, of course, when Hardy glimpses something of Lawrence's sense of sexual love as the great connecter, as when Troy tenderly kisses the dead Fanny and prefers her to Bathsheba; or when Hardy shows us glimpses of wholeness or completeness in Tess and Angel Clare as they appreciate each other's sexual selves-too late to save their own failed marriage. Certainly the vivacious Arabella at times exhibits a healthy rather than a vengeful grossness, as Lawrence saw. These moments are in a way the book's triumphs, its anticipations of the better side of the sexual revolution to come, its tribute also to Hardy's rare appreciations of such central matters. "Only connect"-the Forsterian motto was on its way, as Lawrence and Daleski seem to have realized.