Abstract
The most rudimentary of all literary transactions begins with the body — the body expressive, symbolic, figurative and vocalic. As an extension of the human body, as also of the common English tongue, ‘voice’ embodies, for both the modern Afro-American Toni Morrison, and the Victorian Wessex regionalist Thomas Hardy, the cultural diversity it simultaneously differentiates and mediates. But it is by infusing the voice of the poet not only into the prose narrative but also into the idioms of the unlettered, that Morrison and Hardy sustain the essential salt-of-the-earth commonness of the English tongue, the vigour and richness of the voice vernacular. Both are self-avowed champions of dialect.
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Notes
Martin Seymour-Smith, Hardy (London: Bloomsbury, 1994) p. 193.
Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye (New York: Washington Square Press, 1972). Page references for quotations given in parenthesis in text.
Toni Morrison, Beloved (London: Chatto & Windus, 1988). Page references for quotations given in parenthesis in text.
See also Hardy’s poem ‘Beyond the Last Lamp’, in which ‘morphic resonance’ completes the idea of a mood-imprint upon the landscape with, There they seem brooding on their pain, And will, while such a lane remain. The Complete Poems of Thomas Hardy, ed. James Gibson (London: Macmillan, 1976) poem no. 257. Hereafter abbreviated to Complete Poems.
Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992) p. 66.
Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1977). Page references for quotations given in parenthesis in text.
Thomas Hardy, Far from the Madding Crowd, New Wessex Edition (London: Macmillan, 1974–5) Ch. 10.
Toni Morrison, Sula (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1973). Page references for quotations given in parenthesis in text.
See Beatty’s ‘Introduction’ to Hardy’s Desperate Remedies in the New Wessex Edition (London: Macmillan, 1975–6). Chapter references for quotations from the novel identified in parenthesis in text.
Thomas Hardy, The Woodlanders, New Wessex Edition (London: Macmillan, 1974–5) Ch. 16. Chapter references for subsequent quotations identified in parenthesis in text.
Thomas Hardy, The Mayor of Casterbridge, New Wessex Edition (London: Macmillan, 1974–5) Ch. 21.
See Barbara Hardy’s ‘Introduction’ to A Laodicean, New Wessex Edition (London: Macmillan, 1975–6) p. 13. Chapter references for quotations from the novel identified in parenthesis in text.
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© 1996 Rosemarie Morgan
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Morgan, R. (1996). Bodily Transactions: Toni Morrison and Thomas Hardy in Literary Discourse. In: Pettit, C.P.C. (eds) Celebrating Thomas Hardy. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-14013-8_9
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