An Offensive Defense: Hardy as social “meliorist” and radical realist
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Hardy, by almost all accounts except for his own, is a depressing and confusing read, and nowhere more so than in Tess of the D’Urbervilles. Feminists have variously argued that the “ruin” of the eponymous heroine was a simple, inexorable act of rape, and even that Tess’s sexuality is in the end empowering. But here I argue that Hardy’s own account of his work needs to be taken at least as seriously as we take Richardson’s statements about the educating and uplifting purpose of his novels Pamela and Clarissa, and that we might even take this work as equivalent to that of Richardson in its importance in the history of the genre. Like Richardson, Hardy balances a highly individualistic heroine and very contemporary, historically contingent, arguments for female agency in general. The author makes a difficult case that a woman may, or may not, better her life through effort, by trying to change her lot from that of a social type to that of a individual. This means that Tess (like Pamela) places the key event in the middle of the book, so that the ramifications rather than the event itself are worked out. It also means that both books break new ground to be worked out by future writers. More controversially, it means that we must read Hardy not as a gloomy pessimist, but as a modest social “meliorist.” Perhaps most controversially, however, it means that we must take him as a very ambitious artistic innovator. Unlike Richardson, who simply writes about the middle class and to the middle class, Hardy maintains two perspectives at once: that of the working people he loves and would help if he could, and that of the middle class audiences whose language he speaks and whose thoughts he most thoroughly, and critically, understands.
Abstract
Hardy, by almost all accounts except for his own, is a depressing and confusing read, and nowhere more so than in Tess of the D’Urbervilles. Feminists have variously argued that the “ruin” of the eponymous heroine was a simple, inexorable act of rape, and even that Tess’s sexuality is in the end empowering. But here I argue that Hardy’s own account of his work needs to be taken at least as seriously as we take Richardson’s statements about the educating and uplifting purpose of his novels Pamela and Clarissa, and that we might even take this work as equivalent to that of Richardson in its importance in the history of the genre. Like Richardson, Hardy balances a highly individualistic heroine and very contemporary, historically contingent, arguments for female agency in general. The author makes a difficult case that a woman may, or may not, better her life through effort, by trying to change her lot from that of a social type to that of a individual. This means that Tess (like Pamela) places the key event in the middle of the book, so that the ramifications rather than the event itself are worked out. It also means that both books break new ground to be worked out by future writers. More controversially, it means that we must read Hardy not as a gloomy pessimist, but as a modest social “meliorist.” Perhaps most controversially, however, it means that we must take him as a very ambitious artistic innovator. Unlike Richardson, who simply writes about the middle class and to the middle class, Hardy maintains two perspectives at once: that of the working people he loves and would help if he could, and that of the middle class audiences whose language he speaks and whose thoughts he most thoroughly, and critically, understands.
참고문헌 (20)
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