Abstract
This chapter discusses Hardy’s use of the dead as speakers. Prosopopeia—or granting the dead a voice—shows the deceased as bitterly resentful, admonishing the living for misrepresenting or betraying them. Hardy underlines our inherent inability to know the dead; what gives them some power over us is their very alterity. Although prosopopeia is regarded as a form that assigns agency, Hardy’s use of this device verges on misappropriation, and the attempt to speak for the dead is often revealed as a pretentious and patronising act. Hardy shows the ultimate act of consideration on the part of the mourner-poet, his commemoration of the dead, to be also a survivor’s guilt-stricken attempt to cope with loss through self-centred mechanisms of projection and fantasy.
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- 1.
The poem was written following a visit to Sturminster Newton where the Hardys had once lived. Hardy went to the churchyard and saw the inscriptions on the tombstones of some deceased friends “so weathered that they could hardly be read” (Bailey 1970: 161).
- 2.
Although “Her Haunting-Ground” is often interpreted as referring to Emma, Lois Deacon and Terry Coleman argue that the poem more likely concerns Tryphena Sparks (Coleman and Deacon 1966: 134). Biographical speculation aside, this poem, like many others—including “Thoughts of Phena” and some of the “Poems of 1912–1913”—shares similar motifs and patterns of thought regarding loss and the inability of the grieving subject to know the dead person.
- 3.
According to Jean Brooks, this is “a new and modern kind of ballad” (Brooks 1971: 127), one of several poems by Hardy that “gain their effect from the ghost of the old ballad of vengeance walking behind the modern narrative in which the deceived husband or wife or lover acts nobly” (ibid.: 122).
- 4.
For similar observations on Hardy’s exploitation and utilisation of the dead by the mourning subject, with a focus on The Woodlanders, see Bennett (1993: 33–34).
- 5.
As Brault and Naas point out in their introduction to The Work of Mourning (which is also discussed above, in Chapter 1), this singular alterity cannot be interiorised; Derrida invokes the unbearable paradox of fidelity shown in the possibility of interiorising what can never be interiorised (Brault and Naas 2001: 10–11).
Works Cited
Bailey, J.O. 1970. The Poetry of Thomas Hardy: A Handbook and Commentary. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press.
Bennett, Brandon. 1993. “Hardy’s Noble Melancholics.” Novel: A Forum on Fiction 27 (1): 24–39.
Brault, Pascale-Anne, and Michael Naas. 2001. Introduction. In Jacques Derrida, The Work of Mourning, ed. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas, 1–30. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press.
Brooks, Jean R. 1971. Thomas Hardy: The Poetic Structure. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Coleman, Terry, and Lois Deacon. 1966. Providence and Mr. Hardy. London: Hutchinson.
Derrida, Jacques. 2001. The Work of Mourning. Edited by Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press.
Fuss, Diana. 2003. “Corpse Poem.” Critical Inquiry 30 (1, Autumn): 1–30.
Hardy, Thomas. 2001. The Complete Poems. Edited by James Gibson. Houndmills and New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Kendall, Tim. 2006. Modern English War Poetry. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
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Benziman, G. (2018). “Spectres that Grieve”: The Dead Speak. In: Thomas Hardy’s Elegiac Prose and Poetry. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-50713-6_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-50713-6_3
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