[Hardy-l] RE: Hardy-l Digest, Vol 37, Issue 10
Jane E Thomas
J.E.Thomas at hull.ac.uk
Fri Oct 17 03:04:58 PDT 2008
'These changes were not made because he felt self- assured (as Jane is) that his creations were fictional. Far from it. He made the changes because he hoped to market his work for a culture for whom these issues were "real" -- not in the least bit fictional. They were live and topical and most certainly active within the cultural imagination. They sprang not out of TH's head entirely but from the world he lived in. As you know, but some readers here may not, he was a magistrate for longer than he was a novelist and keenly interested in the machinations of law.
Nor was he writing into a vacuum, much as we might wish art to be art bearing no vestiges of the prevailing culture or of historical context; I think that bubble was blown long ago, but into a milieu, into a society whose social mores he hoped, deeply, to influence (cf "We will educate them by degrees").'
Rosemarie Morgan
It would be foolish (and not at all what I meant) to suggest that the issues Hardy raises in any of his novel 'sprang out of Hardy's head' with no refrence to the real world or that they were not 'real', 'live' or 'topical'. Neither would I ever suggest that art is ever divorced from the prevailing culture or historical context. Why else would it engage, move, and sometimes stimulate to real action readers and critics alike. My point is that all enagement with what 'really' happens must relate directly to the text and not what any reader might have done in Tess's place. If undecidables are there they are there for very good reason and not just because Hardy was afraid of censure. Whatever Hardy thought about Tess, and he himself admitted to being in love with her, we are dealing with art here and textual effects not raw life. It can be very dangerous to confuse the two.
Thank you Keith for adding clarity to my somewhat unsubtle statement.
Best wishes
Jane
ps I also agree wholeheartedly with Paul. Is the forum really the place to discuss Joan Rivers and the personal lives of its members?
Dr J.E.Thomas
Senior Lecturer
Department of English
University of Hull
East Yorkshire
HU6 7RX
e-mail: j.e.thomas at hull.ac.uk
________________________________
From: hardy-l-request at coyote.csusm.edu [mailto:hardy-l-request at coyote.csusm.edu]
Sent: Thu 10/16/2008 11:43 PM
To: hardy-l at coyote.csusm.edu
Subject: Hardy-l Digest, Vol 37, Issue 10
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Today's Topics:
1. Re: Apologies (Rosemarie Morgan)
2. RE: RE: Tess (Keith Wilson)
3. A Case of Mistaken Identity (carolyn mcgrath)
4. RE: RE: Tess (Rosemarie Morgan)
5. Re: A Case of Mistaken Identity (Rosemarie Morgan)
6. RE: A Case of Mistaken Identity (Niemeyer, Paul J.)
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Message: 1
Date: Thu, 16 Oct 2008 15:59:34 -0500
From: Rosemarie Morgan <Rosemarie.morgan at yale.edu>
Subject: Re: [Hardy-l] Apologies
To: carolynmcgrathuk at yahoo.co.uk, hardy-l at coyote.csusm.edu
Message-ID: <6.0.0.22.2.20081016154132.01e36750 at rm82.mail.yale.edu>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"; format=flowed
I would only question the word "mistakes."
"A man can sleep around, no questions asked, but if a woman makes nineteen
or twenty mistakes she's a tramp." I've been bedazzled many a time but to
put the act or the fellow into a category of "mistakes" seems callow to say
the least. Hardy's word "folly" seems more honest given that when one is
experiencing the act one might have mixed feelings of attraction and
recklessness (folly)all at once, and surely many of us have shared Tess's
own sense of bedazzlement commingled with fear and withdrawal, but it would
be misrepresenting the case (if exculpatory?), I think, to categorise this
lover with that lover and all other lovers as "mistakes."
Cheers,
Rosemarie
>all the best
>
>Carolyn McGrath
>
------------------------------
Message: 2
Date: Thu, 16 Oct 2008 16:30:06 -0400
From: "Keith Wilson" <kgwilson at uottawa.ca>
Subject: RE: [Hardy-l] RE: Tess
To: <hardy-l at coyote.csusm.edu>
Message-ID:
<6246C4496B39F34CA2B466F18E5770D803B1210B at MSMAIL2.uottawa.o.univ>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII"
I'm not sure critics do "speculate outside what is given in the text
itself," if by that one means speculate about events, relating to
characters, that don't occur, or aren't reported as having occurred, in
the text. Thus, yes, we certainly speculate about "textual context" --
a text's relationship to its culture/period etc. But we don't -- not to
any useful analytical/critical end, anyway -- speculate about whether
Angel enters a monastery or runs off with Car Darch or re-emigrates to
Brazil after Tess's execution. He doesn't exist outside the pages of the
novel and he therefore can't be said to do anything after its end. We
don't even speculate profitably about events that might have happened
within the time-frame of the novel that we aren't specifically told of.
Thus if a student were to say in an essay that it is possible that
Prince is killed because the mail-man was incompetent and was himself
driving on the wrong side of the road, exculpating himself by accusing
Tess of having done so, we'd surely say that that is an irrelevant
speculation because the text does nothing to sanction or invite that
additional textual event that the student has posited. The fact that in
"real life" a mail-man could or might make that claim doesn't change the
interpretative limits that the text itself sets.
One of the things that has gone horribly wrong with much teaching of
English these days, and is helping to destroy it as a serious discipline
in high schools (and is on its way to doing the same in universities,
certainly in North America, anyway), is the encouragement of students to
believe that merely because they posit a possibility in relation to
events that could or should have happened in a book (often without
having read the book with any real care, or sometimes even at all), they
are saying something of imaginative or intellectual interest on which
they should be congratulated. I once had a student who somewhat
stridently told me that she found Tess an irritating character who was
entirely to blame for what happened to her: had she been a responsible
young woman (as I assume the speaker imagined that she herself would
have been in a comparable situation), she would have taken herself off
to London and got a job in an office. When I pointed out that there
were problems with this proposition on a number of fronts -- one being
that since Hardy didn't choose to have her do so, the speculation was an
extra-textual irrelevancy, and another being that it showed a limited
understanding of the circumstances faced by Tess in the novel and by
19th-century women of comparable class positions in "real life" -- the
student countered that she had advanced this position in high school and
been congratulated by her English teacher on her provocative insights.
It was hardly surprising, then, that by her over-confident, no-nonsense
lights, this insight of hers came close to rendering all that happens to
Tess in the novel otiose, since she needn't/shouldn't have found herself
in the situations she was in anyway. Oh well, on to the next book then:
anyone for "Bridget Jones's Diary"?
Thanks to Carolyn for reminding us of what is surely a fairly
substantial piece of evidence for the non-rape interpretation of the
transformative event whose nature the text doesn't/can't/chooses not to
specify: for the sexual happening (whatever it is) being confessed to by
Tess to be analogous, as Tess herself claims it is, to the event to
which Angel confesses, it would surely need to be something less
unequivocal than rape.
Best,
Keith
-----Original Message-----
From: Rosemarie Morgan [mailto:Rosemarie.morgan at yale.edu]
Sent: Thursday, October 16, 2008 3:42 PM
To: hardy-l at coyote.csusm.edu
Subject: Re: [Hardy-l] RE: Tess
>I agree with Jane on Tess's sexuality and Hardy's sensitive treatment
>of its complexity.
>And while it is well to "remember that, however moved by and drawn to
>Tess we may feel, she is a fictional construct and not a real woman"
>Hardy's readers are not fictional. "To speculate outside what is given
>in the text itself" is what readers and critics do -- text and textual
>context cannot be separated as Hardy himself recognised-- idly or not.
Rosemarie
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------------------------------
Message: 3
Date: Thu, 16 Oct 2008 22:06:12 +0000 (GMT)
From: carolyn mcgrath <carolynmcgrathuk at yahoo.co.uk>
Subject: [Hardy-l] A Case of Mistaken Identity
To: hardy-l at coyote.csusm.edu
Message-ID: <499339.70947.qm at web27408.mail.ukl.yahoo.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8
Rosemarie, you say, "but it would be misrepresenting the case (if exculpatory?), I think, to categorise this lover with that lover and all other lovers as "mistakes"
yes, you've grasped the basics, but remember not to include the lover you are currently talking to - they are always to be referred to as 'Mr Right', the one you have been seeking all that time you were making one mistake after the other -- but now, 'Ah, at last I've found you!"
Audience and purpose.
It is the often (but not always) splendid Joan Rivers we are talking about here.
best wishes
Carolyn McGrath
------------------------------
Message: 4
Date: Thu, 16 Oct 2008 18:20:26 -0500
From: Rosemarie Morgan <Rosemarie.morgan at yale.edu>
Subject: RE: [Hardy-l] RE: Tess
To: hardy-l at coyote.csusm.edu
Message-ID: <6.0.0.22.2.20081016175643.01e34630 at rm82.mail.yale.edu>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"; format=flowed
Well now, Keith -- you know full well I didn't mean any of the above (re
your email today ) . But perhaps you were responding to another question
altogether.
By textual context I include such things as TH's
(cultural-historical) self-imposed obligation to tailor his texts to his
audience, and his various revisions to the Chase scene are exemplary. As
are also his numerous revisions to Tess's relationship with Alec. These
changes were not made because he felt self- assured (as Jane is) that his
creations were fictional. Far from it. He made the changes because he hoped
to market his work for a culture for whom these issues were "real" -- not
in the least bit fictional. They were live and topical and most certainly
active within the cultural imagination. They sprang not out of TH's head
entirely but from the world he lived in.
As you know, but some readers here may not, he was a magistrate for longer
than he was a novelist and keenly interested in the machinations of law.
Nor was he writing into a vacuum, much as we might wish art to be art
bearing no vestiges of the prevailing culture or of historical context; I
think that bubble was blown long ago, but into a milieu, into a society
whose social mores he hoped, deeply, to influence (cf "We will educate them
by degrees").
I have to confess I didn't read to the foot of your email, Keith, re. the
deplorable state of teaching -- but I will and if necessary amend the above
accordingly.(if I have misrepresented your complaint) - but right now I'm
in the hasties of departing for Manhattan.
I will return
Best
Rosemarie
At 03:30 PM 10/16/2008, you wrote:
>I'm not sure critics do "speculate outside what is given in the text
>itself," if by that one means speculate about events, relating to
>characters, that don't occur, or aren't reported as having occurred, in
>the text. Thus, yes, we certainly speculate about "textual context" --
>a text's relationship to its culture/period etc. But we don't -- not to
>any useful analytical/critical end, anyway -- speculate about whether
>Angel enters a monastery or runs off with Car Darch or re-emigrates to
>Brazil after Tess's execution. He doesn't exist outside the pages of the
>novel and he therefore can't be said to do anything after its end. We
>don't even speculate profitably about events that might have happened
>within the time-frame of the novel that we aren't specifically told of.
>Thus if a student were to say in an essay that it is possible that
>Prince is killed because the mail-man was incompetent and was himself
>driving on the wrong side of the road, exculpating himself by accusing
>Tess of having done so, we'd surely say that that is an irrelevant
>speculation because the text does nothing to sanction or invite that
>additional textual event that the student has posited. The fact that in
>"real life" a mail-man could or might make that claim doesn't change the
>interpretative limits that the text itself sets.
>
>One of the things that has gone horribly wrong with much teaching of
>English these days, and is helping to destroy it as a serious discipline
>in high schools (and is on its way to doing the same in universities,
>certainly in North America, anyway), is the encouragement of students to
>believe that merely because they posit a possibility in relation to
>events that could or should have happened in a book (often without
>having read the book with any real care, or sometimes even at all), they
>are saying something of imaginative or intellectual interest on which
>they should be congratulated. I once had a student who somewhat
>stridently told me that she found Tess an irritating character who was
>entirely to blame for what happened to her: had she been a responsible
>young woman (as I assume the speaker imagined that she herself would
>have been in a comparable situation), she would have taken herself off
>to London and got a job in an office. When I pointed out that there
>were problems with this proposition on a number of fronts -- one being
>that since Hardy didn't choose to have her do so, the speculation was an
>extra-textual irrelevancy, and another being that it showed a limited
>understanding of the circumstances faced by Tess in the novel and by
>19th-century women of comparable class positions in "real life" -- the
>student countered that she had advanced this position in high school and
>been congratulated by her English teacher on her provocative insights.
>It was hardly surprising, then, that by her over-confident, no-nonsense
>lights, this insight of hers came close to rendering all that happens to
>Tess in the novel otiose, since she needn't/shouldn't have found herself
>in the situations she was in anyway. Oh well, on to the next book then:
>anyone for "Bridget Jones's Diary"?
>
>Thanks to Carolyn for reminding us of what is surely a fairly
>substantial piece of evidence for the non-rape interpretation of the
>transformative event whose nature the text doesn't/can't/chooses not to
>specify: for the sexual happening (whatever it is) being confessed to by
>Tess to be analogous, as Tess herself claims it is, to the event to
>which Angel confesses, it would surely need to be something less
>unequivocal than rape.
>
>Best,
>
>Keith
>
>--
------------------------------
Message: 5
Date: Thu, 16 Oct 2008 18:34:29 -0500
From: Rosemarie Morgan <Rosemarie.morgan at yale.edu>
Subject: Re: [Hardy-l] A Case of Mistaken Identity
To: carolynmcgrathuk at yahoo.co.uk, hardy-l at coyote.csusm.edu
Message-ID: <6.0.0.22.2.20081016182218.02c43570 at rm82.mail.yale.edu>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"; format=flowed
I'm not sure what this means, Carolyn. I never had any concept - never-
ever - of a Mr Right. I had always thought such a cultural notion mythic.
I simply enjoy-- usually with great pleasure and satisfaction in the
moment, the "Mr" (and once or twice the Ms) I am spending my present-day
hours with. I honestly can't say they were or are "mistakes" for this
sounds like a ghastly betrayal to me. Whether it's a day or two (?) as in
Angel's case, or several weeks (as in the case of Tess) they were formative
times and in many ways enriching albeit occasionally sad & disappointing
(but that is also enriching).
I'm glad you feel I've "grasped the basics" but I'm not sure what they are.
I have only ever been a "free lover"** and that's a perpetual learning
experience -- to me
Best
Rosemarie
** Apologies to my husbands
Who is Joan Rivers?
>yes, you've grasped the basics, but remember not to include the lover you
>are currently talking to - they are always to be referred to as 'Mr
>Right', the one you have been seeking all that time you were making one
>mistake after the other -- but now, 'Ah, at last I've found you!"
>
>Audience and purpose.
>
>It is the often (but not always) splendid Joan Rivers we are talking about
>here.
>
>best wishes
>
>Carolyn McGrath
>
>
------------------------------
Message: 6
Date: Thu, 16 Oct 2008 17:42:16 -0500
From: "Niemeyer, Paul J." <pniemeyer at tamiu.edu>
Subject: RE: [Hardy-l] A Case of Mistaken Identity
To: <hardy-l at coyote.csusm.edu>
Message-ID:
<C4EA05366DC1F0479CDB8F3A265FFD2E02610D3F at Franklin.tamiu.edu>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"
________________________________
From: Rosemarie Morgan [mailto:Rosemarie.morgan at yale.edu]
"Who is Joan Rivers?"
You're kidding, right? If not:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joan_Rivers
As if this has anything to do with Hardy. . .
Paul
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