Abstract
In the Preface to the 1896 edition of The Woodlanders, Hardy remarked that in this story, ‘as in one or two others in this series which involve the question of matrimonial divergence, the immortal puzzle — given the man and the woman, how to find a basis for their sexual relation — is left where it stood’. Hardy liked to attach such disclaimers to his work, and all the more where it was bound to prove controversial, and his readers, then and since, have generally ignored them. But in exploring human sexual relations, one of the questions he left unresolved, if hardly where it stood, was how far the man and the woman — especially the woman — are indeed ‘given’. Not very far, according to John Stuart Mill, who argued in The Subjection of Women that what was called ‘the nature of women’ was in truth ‘an eminently artificial thing — the result of forced repression in some directions, unnatural stimulation in others’, and so not to be made the basis for a theory of their political rights, nor of their sexual relation with men.1 Begging his own question, Mill saw women’s ‘nature’, so called, as ‘artificial’, ‘unnatural’: socially constructed, not given. Charles Darwin, among others, took the contrary position. Both The Origin of Species and The Descent of Man helped to underpin the biological determinism which shaped so many accounts of the nature of men and women in the years when Hardy was writing fiction.
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Notes
John Stuart Mill: Three Essays, ed. Richard Wollheim (London and Oxford, 1975), p. 451.
Darwin grounds his claim that ‘man has ultimately become superior to woman’ on the effects both of sexual selection, or the contest of rival males, and of natural selection, or the struggle for the resources necessary to life, from which, at least in the Victorian middle class, women were supposedly exempt: ‘Difference in the Mental Powers of the Two Sexes’, in The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex (London, 2003), pp. 563–6. For a critique, see Cynthia Eagle Russett, Sexual Science: The Victorian Construction of Womanhood (Cambridge, MA, 1989), pp. 80–9.
A Pair of Blue Eyes, ed. Pamela Dalziel (Harmondsworth, 1998), p. 158.
Desperate Remedies, ed. Mary Rimmer (Harmondsworth, 1998), pp. 448 (Preface to 1889 edition), 57, 135, 32.
Desperate Remedies, pp. 56, 133, 242, 406. So too whatever drew Bathsheba to Troy will not be satisfied by Gabriel Oak, despite his request that for their wedding she wear her hair ‘as she had worn it years ago on Norcombe Hill’, so that she seems ‘in his eyes remarkably like the girl of that fascinating dream’: in his eyes, perhaps, but not in those of the reader (Far from the Madding Crowd, eds Rosemarie Morgan and Shannon Russell (Harmondsworth, 2000), p. 351). Cytherea similarly engineers, on the last page of the novel, a repetition of an earlier outing with Springrove.
Desperate Remedies, p. 75. Such observations are less in evidence in Under the Greenwood Tree, but even here Fancy Day makes a general rule of her own failings: ‘It is my nature — perhaps all women’s — to love refinement of mind and manners’ (Under the Greenwood Tree, ed. Simon Gatrell (Oxford, 1985), p. 176).
Herbert Spencer, The Study of Sociology (London, 1873), p. 377.
Havelock Ellis, Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 3: Analysis of the Sex Impulse, Love and Pain (Philadelphia, 1903), p. 33. Spencer’s comments on the ‘earlier arrest of individual evolution in women than in men’ are also relevant here: Stephen, as a man, can aspire to become Knight’s equal; Elfride, as a woman, is destined always to lag behind him.
As several critics have noticed. Penny Boumelha comments on Hardy’s ‘narrative ambivalence’ in Thomas Hardy and Women: Sexual Ideology and Narrative Form (Brighton, 1982), p. 32.
Patricia Ingham, in Thomas Hardy (Hemel Hempstead, 1989), writes of a ‘fault-line’ running through the early novels (p. 12).
Far from the Madding Crowd, p. 310; Desperate Remedies, p. 253. So too Elfride agrees to marry Lord Luxellian ‘for the benefit of my family’, and to turn her ‘useless life to some practical account’ (A Pair of Blue Eyes, p. 377). Ethelberta’s decision to marry for the good of her family is taken more dispassionately, but she also has male advice, from Mill’s essay on Utilitarianism: The Hand of Ethelberta, ed. Tim Dolin (Harmondsworth, 1996), pp. 287–9.
Rosemarie Morgan, Women and Sexuality in the Novels of Thomas Hardy (London, 1988), p. 13.
Ingham, Thomas Hardy, p. 14; Roger Ebbatson, Hardy: The Margin of the Unexpressed (Sheffield, 1993), p. 18.
Hansard Parliamentary Debates (Lords), 3rd. ser., 289 (24 June 1884), col. 1219; quoted from Deborah Gorham, ‘“The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon” Re-Examined: Child Prostitution and the Idea of Childhood in Late-Victorian England’, Victorian Studies, 21 (1977–78), p. 366.
Pall Mall Gazette, 6 July 1885. For discussion, see Michael Pearson, The Age of Consent: Victorian Prostitution and Its Enemies (Newton Abbott, 1972).
Deborah Gorham, ‘The Maiden Tribute’, and, especially, Judith R. Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London (Chicago, 1992).
Tess of the d’Urbervilles, eds Juliet Grindle and Simon Gatrell (Oxford, 1986), pp. 64, 31, 127. Subsequent references to this (variorum) edition are cited parenthetically in the text.
The Chase recalls the Forest of White Hart, in Tess’s own Vale of Blackmoor, as J. Hillis Miller notes in Fiction and Repetition: Seven English Novels (Harvard, 1982), p. 129.
W.T. Stead, The Armstrong Case: Mr Stead’s Defense Told in Full (London, 1885), p. 12; quoted from Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight, p. 112.
See Michael Mason, The Making of Victorian Sexual Attitudes (Oxford and New York, 1994), pp. 82–115.
Cf. Gillian Beer, Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot, and Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 2nd edn (Cambridge, 2000), p. 200: ‘The social emphasis on virginity, Hardy suggests, cannot be naturalised.’
to two passages in the novel, Tess’s dawn rising at the dairy (pp. 242–3), and the closing scene, ‘in which her body is viewed by the “riveted” eyes of the spectators of her execution’. However, the passage leading to the description of the sleepy Tess is an ironic account of Angel Clare’s ‘sense of luxury’ at his ‘power of viewing life’ in the countryside. The last words before Tess appears are ‘in his eyes’ the narrator is consciously distanced from Clare, as is Hardy. In the closing scene, the eyes of the spectators (Angel and Liza-Lu) are in fact riveted to the flag signalling Tess’s execution: to the public statement about her body, not the body itself. Hardy lays the blame for Tess’s difficulties not on her body, but on those who seek to appropriate it, or trace their own patterns upon it. See Lynn Pykett, ‘Ruinous Bodies: Women and Sexuality in Hardy’s Late Fiction’, Critical Survey, 5(2) (1993), pp. 157–66.
Kate Millett, Sexual Politics (1969; London, 1973), p. 133.
Robert Langbaum, Thomas Hardy in Our Time (London, 1995), p. 16.
T. R. Wright, Hardy and the Erotic (London, 1989), p. 120.
Jude the Obscure, ed. Dennis Taylor (Harmondsworth, 1998), p. 91. Subsequent references to this edition, based on the 1895 text, are cited parenthetically. Part of what follows draws on an earlier essay, ‘Sexual Ideology and Narrative Form in Jude the Obscure’, English, XXXVIII (Autumn 1989), pp. 211–24.
See Gail Cunningham, ‘“He-Notes”: Reconstructing Masculinity’, in Angelique Richardson and Chris Willis, eds, The New Woman in Fiction and Fact: Fin-de-Siécle Feminisms (London, 2001), pp. 96–7.
Ellis’s Sexual Inversion, co-written with John Addington Symonds, was first published in a German translation in 1896, and in English a year later. Almost at once it ran into difficulties in the courts; later editions, with Symonds’s name removed, were published in America. For its history and arguments, see Phyllis Grosskurth, Havelock Ellis: a Biography (London, 1980), pp. 173–204.
See Linda Dowling, Hellenism and Homosexuality in Victorian Oxford (Ithaca, 1994).
Jude himself is eager for such a relationship: hence his hero-worship of Phillotson, and his visit to the composer of the hymn which so moves him. Jude’s character resembles that of what Edward Carpenter calls ‘the normal type of the Uranian man’, which combines ‘masculine powers of mind and body with the tenderer and more emotional soul-culture of the woman’. Such men, according to Carpenter, are tender towards children and animals, moved by intuition rather than reason, and often dreamers, with the sensibilities of the artist. See Edward Carpenter, Love’s Coming of Age (1914).
Ann Heilman, ed., The Late Victorian Marriage Question: A Collection of Key New Woman Texts (London, 1998), 5 vols, II, pp. 129–30. The story of Jude and Sue shows Hardy testing the boundaries set by conventional accounts of male and female sexual identity.
Mona Caird, The Morality of Marriage and Other Essays on the Status and Destiny of Women (London, 1897), p. 106. Caird, like Sue Bridehead, and like Hardy, shared, and often cited, Mill’s commitment to individual development.
Sue’s words echo one of the age’s more notorious books about sexuality, George Drysdale’s The Elements of Social Science (1855, but frequently reprinted). Arguing the necessity of sexual intercourse to the health and virtue of both men and women, Drysdale proposed a ‘law of exercise’: that the sexual organs, like any others, needed to be used if they were not to atrophy. For Drysdale’s work and influence, see Michael Mason, The Making of Victorian Sexual Attitudes (Oxford, 1994), pp. 188–213.
Ellis Ethelmer was the pseudonym of Ben Elmy, the husband of Elizabeth Wolstenholme, though it is likely that work published over the name reflects the thinking of them both: see Lucy Bland, Banishing the Beast, (Harmondsworth, 1995), pp. 141–2.
Sheila Jeffreys, The Spinster and Her Enemies: Feminism and Sexuality 1880–1930 (London, 1985), chapter 2, ‘Continence and Psychic Love’.
Postscript to Jude, p. 467; contribution to the New Review symposium (June 1894) headed ‘The Tree of Knowledge’, quoted from Michael Millgate, ed., Thomas Hardy’s Personal Voice: The Essays, Speeches, and Miscellaneous Prose (Oxford, 2001), p. 132; for Hardy’s advice to Agnes Grove on her article on ‘What should children be told?’, see Letters, II, pp. 101, 114–24.
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Mallett, P. (2004). ‘the immortal puzzle’: hardy and sexuality. In: Mallett, P. (eds) Palgrave Advances in Thomas Hardy Studies. Palgrave Advances. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230519930_9
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