Thomas Hardy’s ‘The Chapel-Organist’ – Saint or Siren? Gendered Perception and the Sacred Setting

Quinn, Iain

doi:10.1007/978-3-319-49223-0_2

Iain Quinn⁴

Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in Music and Literature ((PASTMULI))

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Abstract

Hardy’s portrayal of The Chapel-Organist provides an examination that centres on the woman organist and the gendered perception of her as the ‘Other’ within Victorian society. This role is placed in a further historical context by drawing on the study of women organists in both medieval and Victorian convents and sisterhoods proving that the perception was not far-reaching on Hardy’s part, but rather astutely gauged by historical and contemporary precedent. In considering aspects of women as the ‘Other’, this study utilises the writings of Michel Foucault and Sigmund Freud, along with Freud’s later respondents to assess how close Hardy’s fictional narrative was to the image of a Victorian woman and more critically the actions of the protagonist. Through this study an intriguing circumstance evolves filled with moral and ethical questions, all within a house of worship, that bring a unique resonance to the larger study of Victorian values when allied to music.

The Chapel-Organist, Thomas Hardy (A.D. 185–)

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Notes

1.
Thomas Hardy, Late Lyrics and Earlier With Many Other Verses, ed. David Price (2002; Project Gutenberg, 2015), http://www.gutenberg.org/files/4758/4758-h/4758-h.htm#page150.
2.
Anthony Trollope, Four Lectures, ed. M. L. Parrish (London: Constable, 1938), 108.
3.
Eva Mary Grew, ‘Thomas Hardy as Musician’, Music & Letters, Vol. 21, No. 2 (April 1940): 120.
4.
Ibid., 128.
5.
Ibid., 120.
6.
Elna Sherman, ‘Music in Thomas Hardy’s Life and Work’, The Musical Quarterly, Vol. 26, No. 4 (October 1940): 422.
7.
Ibid.
8.
Sherman, ‘Music in Thomas Hardy’s Life and Work’, 422.
9.
Carl J. Weber, ‘Thomas Hardy Music: With a Bibliography’, Music & Letters, Vol. 21, No. 2 (1940): 172.
10.
Sherman, ‘Music in Thomas Hardy’s Life and Work’, 421.
11.
La Trobe, The Music of the Church, 126.
12.
Thomas Hardy, Desperate Remedies (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1905), 161–162.
13.
Sherman, ‘Music in Thomas Hardy’s Life and Work’, 426. Also Joan Grundy, Hardy and the Sister Arts (London: Macmillan, 1979), 136.
14.
Ibid., 434.
15.
Delia da Sousa Correa, George Eliot, Music and Victorian Culture (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 60.
16.
Ibid.
17.
Susan McClary, Feminine Endings: Music, Gender and Sexuality (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 151.
18.
Sousa Correa, George Eliot, Music and Victorian Culture, 61.
19.
Mary Wollstonecraft, Vindication of the Right of Woman [1792], ed. Miriam Brody (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975), 152.
20.
‘P.’, ‘Amusements’, BMM, 2 (1846): 204–205. Sousa Correa, George Eliot, Music and Victorian Culture, 67.
21.
Sousa Correa, George Eliot, Music and Victorian Culture, 70.
22.
Craig. A. Monson, The Crannied Wall (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1992), 191. “Le monache divengono una presenza non vista, si trasformano in una voce,” Gabriella Zarri, “Monasteri femminili a città (secolo xv–xviii)”, in Storia d’Italia, Annali 9: La Chiesa e il potere politico dal Medioeve all’età contemporanea, eds. G. Chittolini and G. Miccolo (Turin: Giulio Einaudi, 1986), 412.
23.
Referred to in Monson, The Crannied Wall, 194.
24.
Ibid., 203.
25.
Susan Mumm, Stolen Daughters, Virgin Mothers (London/New York: Leicester University Press, 1999), 3.
26.
Ibid., 4.
27.
Ibid., 6.
28.
Ibid., 3.
29.
Referred to in Monson The Crannied Wall, 202. ‘A Few More Words on Convents and on English Girls’, Macmillan’s Magazine, 19 (1869): 534–539.
30.
14 September 1888, Chapter of Faults, All Saints Sisters of the Poor – An Anglican Sisterhood in the 19th Century, ed. Susan Mumm (Woodbridge/Rochester, NY: The Boydell Press/Church of England Record Society, 2001), 143.
31.
Ibid. (2002; Project Gutenberg, 2015), http://www.gutenberg.org/files/4758/4758-h/4758-h.htm#page150.
32.
Ibid. (21 September 1888): Mumm, All Saints Sisters of the Poor, 144.
33.
Mrs. [Sarah Stickney] Ellis, The Daughters of England: Their Positions in Society, Character and Responsibilities (London: Fisher, 1842), 104–105.
34.
Janette Cooper, The Reluctant Organist. RSCM Handbook No. 1 (Croydon: Royal School of Church Music, 1976), 3–4.
35.
Richard Leppert, Music and Image: Domesticity, Ideology and Socio-Cultural Formation in Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 31.
36.
Thomas Hardy, Under the Greenwood Tree (London: Chatto & Windus, 1906), 39.
37.
Phyllis Weliver, Women Musicians in Victorian Fiction (Aldershot/Burlington: Ashgate, 2000), 48.
38.
Judith Barger, Elizabeth Stirling and the Musical Life of Female Organists in Nineteenth-Century England, 181.
39.
Mrs. [Matilda Marian] Pullan, Maternal Counsels (London: Darton, 1855), 81. Sousa Correa, George Eliot, 77.
40.
Sousa Correa, George Eliot, 77.
41.
Barger, Elizabeth Stirling, 8.
42.
Weliver, Women Musicians, 113.
43.
Donovan Dawe, Organists of the City of London 1666–1850 (Padstow: By the author, 1983), 3–5, 73 passim.
44.
A Clergyman, ‘No Lady Need Apply’, The Musical World, 35 (1857): 553.
45.
Perhaps a Satirical Reference to Psalm 121.
46.
W. C. Filby, ‘Male and Female Organists’, The Musical Standard, Vol. 1, No. 19, (1863): 274.
47.
John Stainer, ‘How to Play the Organ’, The Girl’s Own Paper, 1 (1880): 328.
48.
Ibid.
49.
Stephen S. Stratton, ‘Women in Relation to Musical Art’, Proceedings of the Musical Association, Ninth Session, 1882–1883 (London: Stanley Lucas, Weber & Co, 1883).
50.
Ibid., 115.
51.
Ibid.
52.
Ibid., 116–117.
53.
Ibid., 120.
54.
Ibid.
55.
Ibid., 123.
56.
Ibid.
57.
Ibid., 126.
58.
Ibid., 124.
59.
Ibid., 132.
60.
Ibid., 133.
61.
Ibid.
62.
Ibid. This further Relates to de Beauvoir’s Woman as a ‘Being’ in Relation to a Man
63.
Stratton, ‘Women in Relation to Musical Art’, 139.
64.
Ibid., 137.
65.
‘Voluntary Organist Wanted’, Musical Times, 29 (1888): 582; ‘An Advertisement Recently Appeared’, Musical Times, 30 (1889): 212. Barger, Elizabeth Stirling, 46. It can be noted that this situation is not vastly different today when many positions are offered with paltry remuneration.
66.
William Holman Hunt, The Awakening Conscience, http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/hunt-the-awakening-conscience-t02075.
67.
Richard Leppert, The Sight of Sound (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 207.
68.
An instrument used in both domestic and ecclesiastical settings.
69.
Janette Cooper, The Reluctant Organist. RSCM Handbook No. 1 (Croydon: Royal School of Church Music, 1976).
70.
King Hall, ‘How to Play the Harmonium’, The Girl’s Own Paper, 1 (1880): 472.
71.
John Stainer, ‘How to Play the Organ’, The Girl’s Own Paper, 1 (1880): 328.
72.
Barbara Owen, ‘Elizabeth Stirling and the English Pedal Organ’, De Mixtuur, 65 (1900): 267.
73.
The Musical Standard, 30 March 1865.
74.
Ibid., 22 April 1865: 376.
75.
The Musical Standard, 15 April 1863: 258–259.
76.
The Musical Standard, 20 November 1869: 242.
77.
Frank Dicksee, Harmony, http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/dicksee-harmony-n01587.
78.
Richard Leppert, The Sight of Sound (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 161.
79.
Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1, Trans. Robert Hurley (London: Penguin Books, 1979), 3–4.
80.
Her age is Never Disclosed, Only that her Appearance Belies her Real Age.
81.
Richard Leppert, The Sight of Sound (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 193.
82.
Foucault, The History of Sexuality, 19.
83.
Ibid.
84.
Ibid., 21.
85.
Thomas Hardy, ‘The Caged Goldfinch’, The Complete Poems, ed. J. Gibson (London: Macmillan, 1976), 436.
86.
Jerome Hamilton Buckley, The Victorian Temper (New York: Random House, 1951), 2.
87.
Edward Green, ‘Music and the Victorian Mind: The Musical Aesthetics of the Rev. H. R. Haweis’, International Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music, Vol. 39, No. 2 (December 2008), 243–244.
88.
Hardy, Under the Greenwood Tree, 150.
89.
Hardy, Under the Greenwood Tree, 178–179.
90.
References from T. R. Wright, Hardy and the Erotic (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1989), 10.
91.
Ibid.
92.
Juliet Mitchell, Psychoanalysis and Feminism (New York: Pantheon Books, 1975), 308.
93.
Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (London: Jonathan Cape, 1960), 76. Referred to in Mitchell, Psychoanalysis and Feminism, 309.
94.
A detailed commentary of the subject of ‘experience’ can be seen in the following article: Joan W. Scott, ‘The Evidence of Experience’, Critical Inquiry, Vol. 17, No. 4 (1991): 773–797.
95.
Lionel Johnson, The Art of Thomas Hardy (London: John Lane The Bodley Head Ltd., 1923), 172.

Bibliography

Buckley, Jerome Hamilton. The Victorian Temper (New York: Random House, 1951).
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Pedals, “Pedal’s Reply”, The Musical Standard, o.s., Vol. 1, (1863).
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Stainer, John. “How to Play the Organ”, The Girl’s Own Paper, Vol. 1, (1880).
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College of Music, Florida State University, Tallahassee, Florida, USA
Iain Quinn

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Quinn, I. (2017). Thomas Hardy’s ‘The Chapel-Organist’ – Saint or Siren? Gendered Perception and the Sacred Setting. In: The Organist in Victorian Literature. Palgrave Studies in Music and Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-49223-0_2

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-49223-0_2
Published: 30 December 2016
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