Modern Criticism of Tess of the d'Urbervilles

Summary

In his article, Irving Howe argues that Tess of the d’Urbervilles “stands at the center of [Thomas] Hardy’s achievement, if not his greatest then certainly his most characteristic” (406). Hardy had a knack, he says, for understanding the “emotional life” (406) of women, and nowhere does it show better than in this novel. He stakes the whole of Tess of the d’Urbervilles on this understanding, for no other character or element comes close to mattering nearly as much as Tess herself. Irving says that the novel wants us to move beyond judging the main character, and “move into a kindlier climate shared by Christian charity and pagan acceptance” (408). As for the plot, Irving reminds us that, if looked at bare bones, it is a rather simple one made of bits of ordinary melodrama—betrayal; secrets; a series of horrible events—that serve as  the means for Tess’s soul testing in four major episodes or acts (408-409). The article goes on to summarize the four acts to show how the design and artistic detail truly makes the character of Tess stand out (419). All this builds to his main point, the “heart of the book”: the “figure of Tess herself….a woman made real through the art of craft”, not Tess-as-symbol or Tess-as-theme. Those are overreaches. She is instead that rare achievement of “goodness made interesting” (421).

Analysis

“Tess is one of the great images of human possibility, conceived in the chaste, and chastening, spirit of the New Testament. Very few proclaimed believers have written with so complete a Christian sentiment as the agnostic Thomas Hardy” (409) —an interesting idea, one that surprised me. But it is true. Hardy quite plainly wants readers to sympathize with Tess, to judge her not by what happened but for who she is. This is in fact the goal: the heart of both Christian love and secular acceptance, as noted above. Those two values are one and the same anyway, if honestly considered. So perhaps in writing such a dark and hopeless novel, Hardy hoped, in his own dark way, we would open ourselves to compassion.

Contemporary Critical Reception of Tess of the d'Urbervilles

Summary

When Tom Hardy’s “grim Christmas gift” (381), Tess of the d’Urbervilles, came out in 1891, many of the contemporary reviewers hailed it as a literary triumph—and hated it as a story. Not all, of course: The Pall Mall Gazette (381) praises the novel as a “concentrated tragedy” that gives a “most moving presentment of a ‘pure woman’,” and The Athenaeum (382), despite some quibbles over the author’s lack of impartiality, predicts Hardy’s work is “destined…to rank high among the achievements of Victorian novelists.” Others disagree. Their howls of displeasure center chiefly on Tess’s artistic honesty, or lack thereof. “[T]here is not,” writes The Saturday Review, “one single touch of nature either in John Durbeyfield or in any other character. All are stagey….Tess herself comes nearest to possibility…but even she is suggestive of the carefully-studied simplicity of the theatre” (383). The Review complains that if how a story is told matters more than what it is about, then “Mr. Hardy” has failed, telling “an unpleasant story in a very unpleasant way” (384). The Spectator agrees. “On the whole, we deny that Mr. Hardy has made out the case for Tess.… we cannot at all admire Mr. Hardy’s motive for writing this very powerful novel” (384). Perhaps Robert Louis Stevenson captures their feelings best when he cries, “Not alive, not true…not even honest!” (387).

Analysis

The Saturday Review writes: “it matters much less what a story is about than how that story is told” (384). This reminds me of an argument I have read many times by John Gardner, famous artistic novelist and creative writing teacher. “Nothing, let me pause to argue, could be farther from the truth than the notion that theme is all” (40). He explains:

The good young writer…knows what he knows and will not budge—chiefly knows that the first quality of good storytelling is storytelling. A profound theme is of trifling importance if the characters knocked around by it are uninteresting, and brilliant technique is a nuisance if it pointlessly prevents us from seeing characters and what they do. (44)

I believe The Saturday Review levels, in essence, this charge against Hardy and Tess of the D’Urbervilles. His theme is deep, his technique masterful, but his characters act so unbelievably that he failed on that most vital all points, good storytelling. Do I agree? I don’t know; but the argument does speak to the uneasiness I had while reading Tess. In moments Hardy would call fate, I found self-defeat. The author made his characters choose the worst of available choices at the worst moments—every time. No human being would do this. Hardy—again, every time—would trip up his characters not with a fateful event, but with the worst possible chain of fateful events. Perhaps the universe is random and therefore uncaring, but it is not so concentrated in malice. The book is one giant, oozing application of Murphy’s Law. To paraphrase Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, the god that Hardy doesn't believe in is unbelievably cruel.

And so I stick with Gardner:

In the final analysis, what counts is not the philosophy of the writer (that will reveal itself in any case) but the fortunes of the characters, how their principles of generosity or stubborn honesty or stinginess or cowardice help them or hurt them in specific situations. What counts is the characters' story. (43)

Works Cited

Gardner, John. On Becoming a Novelist. New York, NY: Harper & Row, 1985. Print.

Hardy, Thomas. Tess of the D'Urbervilles: An Authoritative Text: Backgrounds and Sources, Criticism. Ed. Scott Elledge. New York: Norton, 1991. Print.

Recent Criticism of Middlemarch

Summary

I read two very different critical essays on Middlemarch, Matthew Rich’s thoughts with the longwinded title, “’Not a Church, but an Individual Who is His or Her Own Church’: Religion in George Eliot’s Middlemarch”, and Robert B. Heilman’s “’Stealthy Convergence’ in Middlemarch”. Rich explores the role of individualized religion amongst the characters of Middlemarch, noting that organized religion, while an assumed component, plays almost no overt role in the plot. There are plenty of religious figures, clergy and the like, but we never see them officiating or preaching or attending church, (except when Ladislaw snuck into Causabon’s church to see Dorothea, where the service itself played no part). Rich tells us that whatever the formal religion of the characters (Anglican, primarily), each character operates on prominent personal religious principle upon which the narrator and the reader are to judge. Caleb Garth’s “noble form of religion” is “To do a good day’s work and do it well” (Rich 650), and know one has worked honorably. Dorothea has a different personal religion, the “religion of radiant sympathy” (652). “What do we live for, “she asks, “if it is not to make life less difficult to each other?” (652). Rich also convinces us, amazingly, that Mr. Bulstrode, also has a personal religion: the facade of religious commitment, one “concerned only with the empty belief in…ritual or ceremony, not the understanding and practice of moral teachings” (654). In Bulstrode’s mind, if he looks religious, then he is so, thus avoiding true accountability.

                Heilman’s “Stealthy Convergence” takes on the artistry Eliot shows in switching from one plot thread to the next. Instead of clumsy, abrupt transitions, Eliot uses the novelistic equivalent of panning used in modern film, where the reader’s attention is slowly transitioned from one set of characters to another by carefully overlapping conversation, as found in the party scene where we first meet Lydgate, or matching themes, as when the seemingly abrupt return from the Lydgate thread to Dorothea’s honeymoon in Rome. Heilman says we are here taken through parallel themes with “two eager idealists feeling educative blows by unanticipated crude reality, one in professional, the other in domestic, life” (Heilman 621), the professional blow being Lydgate pressured to compromise his morals by voting for Tyke, and the domestic blow being Dorothea’s first inkling into Causabon’s true nature as an insecure and aloof scholar.

Analysis

I found in Heilman the only defense of Dorothea’s marriage to Will Ladislaw. All Middlemarch marriages are of opposites, and theirs is the most interesting of all as a “convergence of the moral and the aesthetic” (622). Dorothea has a “strong Victorian cast” that emphasizes duty and selfless service. Ladislaw is a “pure Romantic” (capital R), an “outsider” without ties, but a strong “sense of honour” (622). To Heilman, then, Ladislaw and Dorothea complement each other, in the same way that Fred and Mary do, and even (in a negative way) Lydgate and Rosamond. I see his point, although I can’t say that, even from this perspective, that Eliot made her case for the marriage. The other marriages work very well, in a plotting, storytelling sense, for the marriages either fix character defects or deliciously expose them. With Ladislaw, this did not happen, and I still come back to the sense of “why him?”

Works Cited

Eliot, George. Middlemarch: An Authoritative Text, Backgrounds, Criticism. Ed. Bert G. Hornback 2nd ed. New York: Norton, 2000. Print.

Contemporary Reviews of Middlemarch

Summary

If the contemporary reviews in our critical edition represent a typical reception, it appears that reviewers of Middlemarch were conflicted in their opinions. On one hand, they all praised Eliot’s depth of character, descriptive powers, and acute observation of human nature as unparalleled. “Never before have so keen and varied an observation, so deep insight into character and motives, so strong a grasp of conceptions, such power of picturesque description, worked together to represent through the agency of fiction an author’s moral and social views” (573). One the other, the reviewers thought the novel too didactic, for all its genius of insight and mastery of language. The Saturday Review went on wish that Eliot had told the story from the purer motive of storytelling, rather than seeking to teach a lesson. Eliot’s view of the world as too selfish and a society too hollow tended, the review says, to drain away the likeability of otherwise more or less normal characters, such as Celia. In the world of Middlemarch, if one is not as selfless as Dorothea, an obscure St. Theresa, than one is selfish. Saturday Review disagrees, noting there is a difference between selfishness and reasonable care of self. Other reviews quibble over the novel’s structure, notably Henry James lamenting, with some merit, that Dorothea’s character was wasted after the death of Mr. Causabon, and not give the centrality it deserved.

                Essentially all the reviewers loved Eliot’s genius in characterization as she paints them with such subtlety as to be truly lifelike. James proclaims the construction Dorothea a great achievement, and Saturday Review spends well-deserved space on Mr. Causabon. It speaks of him as exceedingly well-drawn: the physical and spiritual personification of dry, worthless scholarship, with his tomblike appearance and tomblike book.

Analysis

James wrote: “The figure of Will Ladislaw is a beautiful attempt, with many finely-completed points; but on the whole it seems to us a failure” (580). I was rather taken off guard to find this same sentiment arise time and again in these reviews, not because I disagree, but because I do agree, but had thought my opinion of no account. As the story progressed, I developed a vague uneasiness about Ladislaw because I could not see how he measured up to Dorothea as a friend or love interest, or even as an Eliot-worthy character generally. James calls him “vague and impalpable”, a figure who never overcomes early insubstantial dilettante ways (580). Like Saturday Review, I found Ladislaw charming, but failing the “test of duty” all other Middlemarchers were to pass. “He does what he likes, right or wrong, to the end of the story; he makes no sacrifices; even his devotion to Dorothea does not preserve him from an unworthy flirtation with his friend Lydgate’s wife. He is happy by luck, not desert” (575). Leslie Stephen was less kind: “But [marrying Ladislaw] seems to imply that a Theresa of our days has to be content with suckling fools and chronicling small beer” (584). As Dorothea’s love for Ladislaw became clearer, I could only say to myself, “Why?” My feeling was not as sharp as the reviewers—just a vague dislike for the character and his role—but they crystallized my undefined feelings exactly.

Works Cited

Eliot, George. Middlemarch: An Authoritative Text, Backgrounds, Criticism. Ed. Bert G. Hornback 2nd ed. New York: Norton, 2000. Print.

Middlemarch Backgrounds

Summary

                I read number of short to medium length letters, journal entries, and essays to, from, and about George Eliot (Eliot and Hornback, 532-69). While they do not meld into one neat and tidy whole, they create a pattern that reveal Eliot as driven, artistic, and highly intelligent. For example, Eliot records in a 1 January 1869 journal entry her explicit goal to write Middlemarch; she completed and published it as planned by the 1 January 1873 entry. The excerpts from Quarry for “Middlemarch” further reveal her commitment to research and organize her art. It is also impressively highlights her intelligence. Eliot cared deeply about her art and her message, as shown when she tells Mr. Blackwood that she avoids reading her critics, hinting that she preferred to avoid discouragement. She goes on to mention that she likes the emotional effect the novel’s installment publication plan had on her readers, a notion that contrasts rather amusingly with her husband’s reason for liking the plan—it made for better sales.

Readers saw the artistry in Eliot’s realistic characters right away. Blackwood praises her at length on their sophistication, while in another letter Eliot had to correct Harriet Beecher Stowe, American author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, who apparently thought Dorothea’s marriage to Casaubon so realistic that she believed, incorrectly, that it was drawn from Eliot’s personal experience. In the “Story-Telling” section from Leaves from a Notebook, Eliot explains that the best storytelling comes from keeping the reader’s interest, and the best way to keep that interest is to introduce a character as a “stranger in some unusual or pathetic or humorous situation,”—pathetic here meaning to cause or evoke pity—” or manifesting some remarkable characteristics” (537).

Eliot has well-articulated, intelligently constructed ideas about the world. As she tells Stowe, she believes that our common humanity supersedes any one religious denomination. Emily Davies relates that Eliot believes honesty as the greatest thing to be taught, whereas dishonesty in speech and action ought to be avoided at all costs, and both impact people and society in general. Davies went on to tell Eliot that the girls at her school did not give up on achieving anything because they could not achieve great things, but rather they did not care to do anything in the first place. Eliot pronounced this as stupid, explaining that stupidity is not only intellectual, but can be of the character as well. She said it is entirely possible to be good and smart at the same time.

Analysis

George Eliot wrote in Leaves from a Notebook that “In endeavouring to estimate a remarkable writer who aimed at more than a temporary influence, we have first to consider what was his individual contribution to the spiritual wealth of mankind” (537). It is this statement that convinces me that Eliot wanted to create great art to stand through time. She wasSense is perhaps too loose a word, but the statements and clues I gathered from just a few pages of letters and other writings show a person deeply interested in the artistic merit of her novel. She wants to throw great lights on the human condition; she wants to render life as accurately as she may, and she expects no less from other authors. She was speaking generically—the title of the essay was “Judgments on Authors”—, yet I sense this is the very ethic she poured into her work.

Works Cited

Eliot, George, and Bert G. Hornback. Middlemarch: An Authoritative Text, Backgrounds, Criticism. 2nd ed. New York: Norton, 2000. Print

Critical Reviews of Mary Barton

Summary

                Three critical reviews from the Norton edition of Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton caught my eye, two by John Lucas and the third by Josephine M. Guy. In “Carson’s Murder and the Inadequacy of Hope in Mary Barton” (501-4), Lucas claims that by inserting Carson’s murder as a plot device, Gaskell avoids challenging her own conclusions (“false hope” as Lucas calls it) on how to help the poor. She reduces John Barton, whom she had given complex, real-world grievances, to the caricature of murderer, now easily handled by her good-hearted hopes. This allowed her to solve the problems she masterfully raised in a tidy way that does not conflict with her preconceived beliefs. But Lucas feels this is a cheat. In his mind, the problem of poverty amongst the Manchester working class defied such simplistic solutions (i.e. Christian solutions).

Interestingly, Lucas argues passionately in favor the novel in “Why We Need Mary Barton” (504-9). His argument here does not contradict, but supports, his prior argument, where he applauded Gaskell’s accurate portrayal of the working poor. It is that very accuracy that leads him to state in the second accuracy the need for Mary Barton. Lucas takes issue when Friedrich Engels, the famous Marxist thinker, claimed after visiting Victorian Manchester to fully understand the conditions and anger of the working class. But Lucas notes that the rich young German missed the complexities found within that world. Gaskell did not. She lays out with an expert eye the subtle, but real, differences between impoverished families like the Bartons, Wilsons, Leghs, and Davenports. Engels attributed a single, unremitting anger to the working class, which Lucas says served revolutionary’s purposes well. In fact, Lucas believes what Engels described was “magnificent”, but insufficient. (It almost as if Engels, second only to Karl Marx as a father of Socialism, was not socialist enough for Lucas.) It is Gaskell who got it fully right.

In “Morality and Economics in Mary Barton” Josephine M. Guy (575-83) observed that the exchange of money and moral acts always went together throughout the novel. She says that for Gaskell, money was necessary for morality. A person who gave money, or lowered the price of goods or services for the needy customer, was moral; those who withheld money or assigned fixed prices were less so. Those that had no money at all were in danger of losing their moral moorings. For example, the poor who had some money, like John Barton did early on, used it to help those needier than themselves. Their family and community lives, while modest, were close knit. But those bonds began to break down in the absence of money. They could not afford to social gatherings or to help the neediest. The most moral characters—Jem, Margaret, Job—were (relatively) financially secure.

Analysis

Lucas says that “Mrs. Gaskell doesn’t think that hatred and vengeance make the sum total of working-class consciousness. Engels does. It is only there that the working class is anti-atomistic…” (508, emphasis original). I find this admission extraordinary. This all but admits that Engels refused to see the working-class in any light that would contradict his desire for socialist revolution. He wanted revolution; he wanted the working class to have hatred and vengeance in their hearts and nothing else; and so that is what he saw. Yet, this is the very type of crime Lucas criticizes Gaskell in “Carson’s Murder and the Inadequacy of Hope in Mary Barton”. Only the belief systems are different: Gaskell held preconceived hopes in a Christian solution; Engels held preconceived hopes in a Socialist one. Lucas notes this, and after some criticism, forgives it. Gaskell received from him no such forbearance. It is clear Lucas favors one hope over the other. That is fine, but one must treat all views, even unfavored ones, with the same intellectual honesty demanded of Gaskell.

Works Cited

Gaskell, Elizabeth Cleghorn, and Thomas Recchio. "Contemporary Reviews." Mary Barton: Authoritative Text, Contexts, Criticism. New York: W.W. Norton &, 2008. 365-90. Print.

Contemporary Reviews of Mary Barton

Summary

Any popular novel wins its share of approval and disapproval from critics. Even so, Mary Barton seemed to incite the greatest of passions amongst its contemporary reviewers.  Appreciative reviewers praised the novel’s masterful blending of fiction and social commentary into a work of art. To them, Mary Barton wrenches at the heart (mostly) without sentimentality as it tells of the plight of the poor and desperate. They laud its vivid picture of this desperation, even to the point of imploring readers to embrace the novel’s message. So powerful are the descriptions of working class speech and ordinary life that they declare the author’s powers of observation keen, and suspect she has firsthand experience in that world. Reviews also praised Mary Barton’s even-handedness in describing the weakness of the poor as well as the rich. For example, the novel describes not only the masters’ unconcern toward the worker, but also the worker’s tendency toward improvidence—wasteful spending and the failure to save money against hard times. But here, even positive reviewers admit that the novel understates worker’s weaknesses, and so the point is easily passed over.

Mary Barton’s detractors chiefly object to what they saw as one-sidedness, and an unfair portrayal of the factory employers. They further object to inaccuracies of the portrayal of the then-current state of English manufacturing in general, working conditions, economics of the time, and worker morale. From my research into reactions and reform to the Industrial Revolution (for my class presentation), anger amongst the working class had indeed calmed somewhat, which lends some strength to this argument. The reviewers write that most masters or factory owners are decent men, and go on to cite statistics that factory conditions are not as dangerous as rumor imagined, and that many workers were undeniably improvident with their wages.

Analysis

“Mary Barton…is a work of no ordinary talent in reference to the humbler characteristics of a novel, whilst its truthful pictures of the humbler classes of society…is an evidence of much higher capacity of the author" (Gaskell et al., 366, emphasis added).

"A [grave] charge has been brought against the book…that it is one-sided and unfair, and places the relation of the whole class of masters to their work people in a false and invidious [i.e. hateful] light” (Gaskell et al., 379, emphasis added).

The two quotes taken from contemporary reviews of Mary Barton illustrate the positive and negative points made in the summary above. But I find they share, perhaps unwittingly, a common value or expectation—that this work of literature ought to represent the truth. “Truthful” is the word the first review calls Gaskell’s portrayal of the working class; where the second, while excerpted from a positive review, notes that many believed the author paints a “false” image. The reviews always examined the novel’s accuracy, as if it were of the utmost importance. It appears Victorian readers expected a work of fiction to hold true to the society and conditions of its setting. No reviewer said, in essence, that the story was wonderful independent of real world accuracy. Rather, they applauded it as truth, or complained that it was not.

Works Cited

• Gaskell, Elizabeth Cleghorn, and Thomas Recchio. "Contemporary Reviews." Mary Barton: Authoritative Text, Contexts, Criticism. New York: W.W. Norton &, 2008. 365-90. Print.