Abstract
This book has, for the most part, focused on Hardy’s novels, tracing the patterns, continuities, and shifts in their representation of written communication. This chapter interrogates how written messages are used and portrayed in Hardy’s short stories and poems. Although shorter formats preclude some of the representational possibilities offered by the novel, including extensive quotation from fictional letters, Hardy’s stories and short poems feature numerous references to letters, telegrams, and handwritten notes. In spite of their enforced brevity, these references are highly effective devices for the exploration of complex relational dynamics.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
Kafka, 229.
- 2.
Charles Bernheimer, Flaubert and Kafka: Studies in Psychopoetic Structure (New Haven: Yale UP, 1982), 161.
- 3.
Miller, Tropes, Parables, and Performatives, 172.
- 4.
Kafka, 229.
- 5.
See Ruth Perry, Novel Relations: The Transformation of Kinship in English Literature and Culture, 1748–1818 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004), 197.
- 6.
On the intertextual resonances between Richardson’s novel and Hardy’s story, see my chapter ‘“Imaginative Sentiment”: Love, Letters, and Literacy in Thomas Hardy’s Shorter Fiction’, Thomas Hardy Short Stories: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Siobhan Craft Brownson and Juliette Schaefer (Aldershot: Ashate, 2016).
- 7.
See the chapter ‘Love and the Novel: “Pamela”’ in Watt’s Rise of the Novel. Since its publication in 1957, scholars have offered more nuanced accounts of the link between romantic marriage and the development of the novel, as well as of the association between the marriage plot and epistolarity. See, for instance, Ruth Perry, Novel Relations and Women, Letters, and the Novel; Favret; Zaczek.
- 8.
Hardy, ‘Candour in English Fiction’, New Review (January 1890): 15–21, quoted in PW, 127.
- 9.
See John Plotz, ‘Motion Slickness: Spectacle and Circulation in Thomas Hardy’s “On the Western Circuit”’, Studies in Short Fiction 33 (1996): 370.
- 10.
The story once more confirms Miller’s claim that distance and desire are the two essential driving forces behind Hardy’s narratives. Miller, Distance and Desire, xii.
- 11.
Altman, 19.
- 12.
See Ebbatson, Hardy: The Margins of the Unexpressed (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1993), 76. Ebbatson argues that, as Edith takes over Anna’s correspondence, ‘the working-class is silenced so that middle-class romance can articulate its own concerns’. Indeed, Anna’s illiteracy initially appears to serve the same narrative purpose as the letter stuck under the carpet in Tess, Jude’s unanswered letters to Christminster dignitaries, and Marty’s ‘unopened and forgotten’ letter to Fitzpiers. Yet, something different is at stake in Hardy’s portrayal of the letters written by Edith on her servant’s behalf. If the failed letters in W, Tess, and Jude emblematise the marginalisation, isolation, and voicelessness of working-class individuals in Victorian society, the letters in ‘On the Western Circuit’ evoke and critique the ways in which working-class experience is rewritten and neutralised in contemporary culture, especially the predominantly middle-class discourse of realist fiction. Anna’s voice is not simply neglected or ignored, but modified in such a way as to make it more attractive—and less disruptive—to the middle-class imagination. A similar process can, of course, be observed in novels by Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, or George Eliot, where working-class characters are treated as mere narrative accessories or objects of ridicule, unless their behaviour and speech conform to the aesthetic standards of middle-class readers.
- 13.
See Siobhan Craft Brownson, ‘“On the Western Circuit”: The Success of a Bowdlerized Story’, PostScript 17, no. 3 (2000): 34. For Craft Brownson, the story ‘underscores the power of words to deceive others as well as self’.
- 14.
Plotz, 382–3.
- 15.
Ibid.
- 16.
Significantly, Richardson’s Pamela was itself inspired by an earlier project, the composition of a letter-writing manual titled Familiar Letters on Important Occasions. On the relationship between Pamela and the letter-writing manual, see Margaret Anne Doody, A Natural Passion: A Study of the Novels of Samuel Richardson (Oxford: Clarendon, 1974), 30.
- 17.
Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest and Other Plays, ed. Peter Raby (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2008), 284.
- 18.
Ibid., 284.
- 19.
Ebbatson, Margins of the Unexpressed, 79.
- 20.
See Mary-Catherine Harrison, ‘Reading the Marriage Plot’, Journal of Family Theory and Review 6 (2014): 121–31.
- 21.
See Jane Thomas, Hardy and Desire, 4.
- 22.
‘1895 Preface’, in W, 3.
- 23.
Ebbatson, Margins of the Unexpressed, 74.
- 24.
Ibid.
- 25.
Kristin Brady and Keith Wilson, ‘Introduction’, in The Fiddler of the Reel and Other Stories, ed. Kristin Brady and Keith Wilson (London: Penguin, 2003), xxxvii.
- 26.
Terri Witek, ‘Repetition in a Land of Unlikeness: What “Life Will Not Be Balked of” in Thomas Hardy’s Poetry’, Victorian Poetry 28, no. 2 (1990): 125.
- 27.
Pite, 374.
- 28.
Deborah Lutz, Relics of Death in Victorian Literature and Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2015), 130.
- 29.
Ibid., 129.
- 30.
DeSales Harrison, The End of the Mind: The Edge of the Intelligible in Hardy, Stevens, Larkin, Plath, and Glück (New York: Routledge, 2005), 37.
- 31.
Gregory Tate, The Poet’s Mind: The Psychology of Victorian Poetry, 1830–1870 (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2012), 188.
- 32.
The phrase ‘purveyor of truth’ is borrowed from Derrida. It usually serves as translation for ‘Le facteur de la vérité’, the title of an article published in 1975 as well as of the second section of La carte postale.
- 33.
See J. O. Bailey, The Poetry of Thomas Hardy: A Handbook and Commentary (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1970), 441. Bailey notes that the poem was ‘written when Hardy was going through old papers for his biography’.
- 34.
On Hardy’s depictions of passive suicide, see Frank Giordano, Jr, ‘I’d have my life unbe’: Hardy’s Self-Destructive Characters (Alabama: University of Alabama Press, 1984).
- 35.
Altman, 129.
- 36.
Estanove, ‘Reality in Excess: Letters and Telegrams in Thomas Hardy’s Poetry’, Fathom 1 (2013), http://fathom.revues.org/140 [accessed: 23/08/2014].
- 37.
Mohit K. Ray, ‘Thomas Hardy as a War Poet, in Critical Spectrum, 190.
- 38.
Miller, Tropes, Parables, and Performatives, 178.
Acknowledgement
This chapter includes revised material from my essay ‘“Imaginative Sentiment: Love, Letters, and Literacy in Thomas Hardy’s Shorter Fiction’, in Thomas Hardy’s Short Stories, ed. Siobhan Craft Brownson and Juliette Schaefer (Farnham: Ashgate, 2016). I thank the editors for permission to use this material.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2016 The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Koehler, K. (2016). Epistolary Ghosts: Letters in Hardy’s Poems and Short Stories. In: Thomas Hardy and Victorian Communication. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-29102-4_8
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-29102-4_8
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-29101-7
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-29102-4
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)