Abstract
This chapter considers examples of epistolary failure—letters that get lost or are misdelivered, notes read at the wrong moment, by the wrong person, or not at all—from Jude the Obscure, The Woodlanders, and Tess of the d’Urbervilles. It argues that Hardy uses letters as a poignant symbol for social isolation and marginalisation, suggesting that to write a letter is a strikingly insignificant form of agency for those who have no power, no network of solidarity, and no communal support to begin with.
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Notes
- 1.
Hill, 66–8.
- 2.
Lewins, 266.
- 3.
Hill considered the adhesive postage stamp to be particularly useful for illiterate correspondents. See Hill, 45; Menke, 38.
- 4.
Richardson’s Pamela (1740) was considered implausible by contemporary readers, who doubted that a servant could be such an adept correspondent. Parodying Richardson in Joseph Andrews (1741), Henry Fielding writes that the protagonist and his beloved Fanny, also a servant, do not correspond ‘during a Twelve-month’s Absence’ because ‘poor Fanny could neither write nor read’. See Henry Fielding, Joseph Andrews, ed. Judith Hawley (London: Penguin, 2003), 87. On eighteenth-century debates about (il)literacy, see Paula McDowell, ‘Why Fanny Can’t Read: Joseph Andrews and the (Ir)relevance of Literacy’, in A Companion to the Eighteenth-Century Novel and Culture, ed. Paula R. Backscheider and Catherine Ingrassia (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005), 174.
- 5.
R. M. Rehder, ‘The Form of Hardy’s Novels’, in Thomas Hardy after Fifty Years, ed. Lance St John Butler (London: Macmillan, 1977), 20.
- 6.
Francesco Marroni, Victorian Disharmonies: A Reconsideration of Nineteenth-Century English Fiction (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2010), 167.
- 7.
An interesting contrast occurs when Jude encounters the composer of the hymn ‘The Foot of the Cross. Here, ‘Jude’s appearance and address [deceive the composer] as to his position and pursuits’ (Jude 195).
- 8.
See Neill, 113; see Raymond and Merryn Williams, 38.
- 9.
Stéphanie Bernard, ‘La science et le savoir obscur dans Jude the Obscure de Thomas Hardy’, Miranda 1 (2010), 6, http://miranda.revues.org/586 [accessed: 13/04/2012]. [‘Culture itself is always the business of the strongest, and cultural capital is always denied to the weakest, whatever his abilities may be’.]
- 10.
See Andrew Cooper, ‘Voicing the Language of Literature: Jude’s Obscured Labor’, Victorian Literature and Culture 28 (2000): 397. As Cooper notes, ‘[t]he university places itself above manual work, and as separate from the working-man’s “sphere,” and consequently the inhabitants of the colleges do not in any way acknowledge Jude’s place within Christminster’.
- 11.
Through his word choice, Hardy implicitly compares class relations to gender relations, suggesting that both sets of relations were governed by the concept of separate spheres.
- 12.
Jude, 79, 80, 84, 91, 321, 332, 337.
- 13.
See Roger Ebbatson, ‘“A Thickness of Wall”: Hardy and Class’, in Companion to Thomas Hardy, 162–3.
- 14.
See Vincent Newey, Centring the Self: Subjectivity, Society and Reading from Thomas Gray to Thomas Hardy (Aldershot; Brookfield, VT: Scolar Press, 1995), 225. For Newey, ‘[i]n a sense Jude’s words are a futile gesture, altering nothing, but simultaneously, they provide the notation of defiant resilience, a sense of personal existence, while also appropriating to him the state of typological isolation and suffering’.
- 15.
See Cooper, 398: Cooper claims that ‘[t]ypically, [Jude] does not create a new language to articulate his situation, but resorts to the reproduction of written language at the moments of personal crisis by quoting from the Bible’.
- 16.
Menke, 40.
- 17.
Boumelha, ‘The Patriarchy of Class: Under the Greenwood Tree, Far from the Madding Crowd, The Woodlanders’, in The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Hardy, ed. Kramer (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999), 141.
- 18.
See Brantlinger, The Reading Lesson: The Threat of Mass Literacy in Nineteenth Century British Fiction (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1998). See Vincent, Literacy.
- 19.
See Mary Jacobus, ‘Tree and Machine: The Woodlanders’, in Critical Approaches, 118. Felice’s appropriation of Marty’s hair ‘sows the seeds of division which set awry all the relationships in the novel’.
- 20.
This inverts the moment in PBE, examined in Chapter 3, when Reverend Swancourt ‘put[s] on his countenance a higher class of look than was customary, as became a poor gentleman who was going to read a letter from a lord’ (PBE 35).
- 21.
See Laurence Estanove, ‘“As though/ I were not by”: Marty South, “Parenthetically”’, Hardy Review 15 (2013): 87.
- 22.
When Fitzpiers enquires why Marty is a better spar-maker than her male colleagues, she explains ‘’tis only that they’ve less patience with the twigs, because their time is worth more than mine’ (122).
- 23.
See Porter, 6. See also Jean Brooks, 219. According to Brooks, ‘Marty’s letter, “the tiny instrument of a cause deep in nature”, produces a mixed bag of delayed consequences that she could scarcely have wished’.
- 24.
See Ingham, 108. See also Kramer, Thomas Hardy: The Forms of Tragedy (Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1975), 104.
- 25.
Jacobus, in Critical Approaches, 117.
- 26.
Patricia Meyer Spacks, ‘Female Resources: Epistles, Plot, and Power’, in Writing the Female Voice: Essays on Epistolary Literature, ed. Elizabeth Goldsmith (Boston: Northeastern UP, 1989), 67, 73.
- 27.
MacArthur, 44.
- 28.
See Beebe, 15.
- 29.
See Favret, 43.
- 30.
See Bossis and McPherson, 68.
- 31.
Beebe, 15.
- 32.
She tries once more, but Angel responds with the words: ‘No, no—we can’t have faults talked of—you must be deemed perfect to-day at least, my Sweet! […] We shall have plenty of time, hereafter, I hope, to talk over our failings. I will confess mine at the same time’ (300).
- 33.
See Widdowson, ‘Hardy and Critical Theory’, in Cambridge Companion, 75; see Wotton, 151.
- 34.
See Leon Waldoff, ‘Psychological Determinism in Tess of the d’Urbervilles’, in Critical Approaches, 140; see Winifred Hughes, Maniac in the Cellar, 186.
- 35.
Roy Morrell, Thomas Hardy: The Will and the Way (Kuala Lumpur: University of Malaya Press, 1965), 98.
- 36.
Langbaum, 13.
- 37.
Lerner, 53.
- 38.
Jeanette Shumaker, ‘Breaking with the Conventions: Victorian Confession Novels and Tess of the d’Urbervilles’, ELT 37 (1994): 452.
- 39.
Higonnet, ‘A Woman’s Story: Tess and the Problem of Voice’, in Sense of Sex, 19.
- 40.
Paul Niemeyer, Seeing Hardy: Film and Television Adaptations of the Fiction of Thomas Hardy (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., 2003), 117.
- 41.
Kathleen Blake, ‘Pure Tess: Hardy on Knowing a Woman’, Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900, 22 (1982): 697.
- 42.
Goode, 130.
- 43.
See Nina Auerbach, ‘The Rise of the Fallen Woman’, Nineteenth-Century Fiction 35 (1980): 29–52.
- 44.
Devine, 173, 3, 174–5.
- 45.
Mallett, “Immortal Puzzle”, 186.
- 46.
See Boumelha, Thomas Hardy and Women: Sexual Ideology and Narrative Form (Brighton: Harvester, 1982), 120. Boumelha argues that ‘all the passionate commitment to exhibiting Tess as the subject of her own experience evokes an unusually overt maleness in the narrative voice’.
- 47.
Goode, 122.
- 48.
Susan David Bernstein, ‘Confessing and Editing: The Politics of Purity in Hardy’s Tess’, in Virginal Sexuality and Textuality in Victorian Literature, ed. Lloyd Davis (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1993), 170.
- 49.
Clementina Black, Illustrated London News, 100, 9 January 1892, 50, quoted in Thomas Hardy: The Critical Heritage, ed. R. G. Cox (London: Routledge, 1979), 187.
- 50.
Usha Walters Kishore, ‘Hardy’s Tragic Characters: “The Children of Light”’, in Thomas Hardy: A Critical Spectrum, ed. Rama Kundu (New Delhi: Atlantic, 2002), 36.
- 51.
Howe, 131.
- 52.
Neill, 131
- 53.
Jane Thomas, Hardy and Desire, 65.
- 54.
Higonnet, ‘Woman’s Story’, 24.
- 55.
Roger Robinson, ‘Hardy and Darwin’, in Writer and his Background, 142.
- 56.
Goode, 131.
- 57.
Garson, 141.
- 58.
Harriet Martineau, Harriet Martineau’s Autobiography: With Memorials by Maria Weston Chapman (London: 1877), 249–50.
- 59.
Siegert, 115.
- 60.
Ibid., 114.
- 61.
Menke, 42.
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Koehler, K. (2016). ‘Unopened and forgotten’: Letters from the Margins. In: Thomas Hardy and Victorian Communication. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-29102-4_7
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