Abstract
This chapter suggests new ways of assessing Hardy’s role in the development of modern elegy. The chapter presents the cultural-historical context surrounding the transition from the excessive and ostentatious mourning rituals typical of the Victorian period to the restrained expression of grief that became prevalent towards the end of the century, followed by even further marginalisation of mourning after the Great War. Utilitarian norms and early twentieth-century psychoanalysis, which censured excessive grief as either redundant or pathological, respectively, influenced Hardy’s elegiac writing. Darwin’s ideas regarding the relationship between conservation and transformation in nature, and the theory that what becomes extinct leaves traces, were also central to Hardy’s representation of bereavement. These influences were behind Hardy’s revision of traditional elegiac conventions.
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Donald Stone provides several examples of the constant presence of death in both the background and forefront of Hardy’s works (Stone 1984: 292–304). For more on Hardy’s ongoing dialogue with the dead, see Jahan Ramazani (1994: 34–66), Tim Armstrong (2000: 89–110) and Julian Wolfreys (2009: 299–312). It is telling that Hardy pronounced the biblical chapter containing King David’s lament over his dead son Absalom (2 Samuel 18) as the “finest example” of prose narrative known to him (cited in Orel 1967: 107).
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Ramazani acknowledges some inconsistency in Hardy’s representation of an ideally preserved “pristine space apart” for memory and grief, but regards it as a partial surrender (in Hardy and in other twentieth-century elegists) to the pressure from modern society to suppress mourning (Ramazani 1994: 14). According to his reading, “the modern elegy enables the work of mourning in the face of social suppression, but it also instances that suppression” (ibid.: 15–16). Yet, rather than mere capitulation to contemporary norms, I observe an intrinsic ambivalence about loss and bereavement in Hardy, which reworks the concept of self-other in the relation between the dead and the living out of which the process of mourning is constructed.
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See, for example, Tim Kendall’s claim that, in his Boer War poetry, Hardy exploits the voices of the dead for his own needs. This is an untypically sceptical (and welcome) reading of Hardy’s poetic devotion to the dead. “Hardy’s authorial enjoyment,” Kendall maintains, “glibly translates pain into poetry. The desire to notice and commemorate victims […] risks falling into a voyeuristic exploitation of their sufferings” (Kendall 2006: 19, see also 16). For similar observations on the utilisation of the dead by the mourning subject in Hardy’s work, focusing on The Woodlanders, see Bennett (1993: 33–34).
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Ramazani (1994: 20). In his discussion of modern elegy , Ramazani shows how this gendering of grief continues into twentieth-century elegies. “Like traditional male elegists, who guardedly associated their laments with nymphs and muses, modern poets sometimes overtly link femininity with mourning in their elegies. Many of the most despondent mourners in Hardy, Frost , and Stevens are women” (ibid.).
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During the late-Victorian period, the cost and magisterial formality of mourning aroused growing opposition (Morley 1971: 75, 79). David Cannadine discusses the heights of extravagance typical of the routine funerary and mourning practices in the early- and mid-Victorian periods and shows how by the early twentieth century the position was reversed, funerals becoming “perfunctory in the extreme” (Cannadine 1981: 190–191, 187). Mourning was now treated as if it were “a weakness, a self-indulgence, a reprehensible, bad habit” (ibid.: 188). After the 1870s the Victorians used less elaborate funeral cars, reduced the number of attendants and abandoned “mutes, trays of feathers and prancing horses”; there were also new “utilitarian specifications for the coffin itself” (Litten 1991: 171). See also the debate in PMLA regarding the origins of the Victorian fascination with death (Schwarzbach and Kucich 1980: 875–877) and Ramazani (1994: 11).
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See Freud (1966–1974: 243–258). Although utilitarianism and psychoanalysis are divergent and in many ways opposing schools of thought, in this respect we may see them as analogous. Spargo maintains that the rationale of psychoanalytic theories of mourning is “largely utilitarian,” in the sense that they see “the good of attaching ourselves to objects of this world [as] a far greater good than a perversely prolonged attachment to the deceased from which the surviving party can derive no practical benefit” (Spargo 2004: 19). Somewhat provocatively, Spargo goes on to posit a utilitarian basis for psychoanalysis: “To the extent that the Freudian work of mourning has become interwoven with other historical, religious, and philosophical conceptions of grief, a psychoanalytic interpretation seems nowhere more prevalent than in our larger cultural preference for utilitarian relationship” (Spargo 2004: 21).
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Homans states that Freud “refashioned the human response to loss in a way that took into account and addressed the changing cognitive, social , and subjective-internal possibilities and limits of his time and culture. The Freudian view of mourning differs in several important ways from the traditional or tame death, and it is these differences that make it modern. […] The burden of loss, once supported by the community, is now carried by the individual alone” (Homans 2000: 7–8).
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Ramazani similarly construes twentieth-century elegists’ antipathy towards the consolatory turn of the genre as “melan cholic.” In elegies by Hardy, Wilfred Owen, W. H . Auden, Sylvia Plath and others, mourning seems unresolved, and the speakers tend to attack both the dead and themselves (Ramazani 1994: 67). See also Kennedy (2007: 55–56).
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Ontological security, a term coined by social theorist Anthony Giddens, refers to people’s “sense of order and continuity in relation to the events in which they participate, and the experiences they have, in their day-to-day lives” (Mellor 1993: 12).
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Letter to the Duke of Argyll, 25 February 1862, in The Letters of Alfred Lord Tennyson, eds. Cecil Y . Lang and Edgar F. Shannon, Jr. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982–1990), Vol. 2: 297. Cited in O’Gorman (2010: 302).
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According to Riegel, qualification of the optimism of traditional elegy concerning the successful work of mourning is felt as early as in Arnold, then in Hardy. The notion of a fairly easily achieved consolation evaporates; and scepticism about mourning’s positive outcome becomes key to elegiac practice in the twentieth century (Riegel 2003: 144–145). Carol Christ discusses also Browning as a precursor of modern attitudes, e.g. in his preoccupation with the physicality of the corpse, which implies “a less ideal construction of the dead body, a fetishism not the source of civic virtue, but of the self’s pretence in the face of death” (Christ 1995: 400).
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Levinas, “Dying for…,” in Entre Nous: On Thinking-of-the-Other, trans. Michael B. Smith and Barbara Harshav (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 216. Cited in Spargo (2004: 28).
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Relevant here is the observation that Hardy’s elegy is sometimes an anti-elegy, since it marks a “shrinking away from knowledge and memory rather than a commemoration” (Harrison 2010: 406).
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For a helpful analysis of performative mourning according to these terms, see Kate Brown’s discussion of grief in George Eliot’s Silas Marner (Brown 1999: 238–240).
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Benziman, G. (2018). Introduction. In: Thomas Hardy’s Elegiac Prose and Poetry. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-50713-6_1
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